The message from the top is now clear: if you're in this country illegally, you're on the table. No carve-outs, no confusing tiers, no agent left guessing in the parking lot before a shift. President Trump reaffirmed the arrest policy after a stretch of muddled guidance had agents and field supervisors scratching their heads about who they could and couldn't pick up. MSN first reported the clarification.

I spent 26 years in the Border Patrol, and I'll tell you what a confused arrest policy does to a field office. Agents stop moving. Nobody wants to be the guy who makes a collar that headquarters later disavows, so the easy answer is to sit on your hands and run paperwork. Morale sinks, the count drops, and the aliens in the community figure out real quick that the pressure's off. Bad guidance wastes man-hours and does worse than that: it tells every illegal alien in a 50-mile radius that the odds just got better.

What reportedly spooked people was internal messaging that seemed to narrow the target set, suggesting enforcement should concentrate strictly on criminal aliens and leave so-called non-criminals alone. That kind of talk travels fast in an agency, and it travels faster in the neighborhoods ICE works. The alarm among agents was real. When the people executing the warrants don't know what the policy is, everybody down the chain makes up their own version, and that's how you end up with one office arresting gardeners and another office letting a previously deported felon walk because nobody signed off.

The President shut it down. Officials came away from the conversation with a simple answer: anyone in the country illegally remains subject to arrest and deportation. Criminals go first, as they should. And a removable alien without a rape conviction is still a removable alien. That's been the law the whole time. Some people in Washington apparently needed a refresher.

Credit where it's due. When the guidance got murky, the fix came from the top instead of from a briefing document nobody reads. Field agents now have a clean answer to the only question that matters at 5 a.m. in a parking lot: can I make this arrest? Yes. Process them, run the record, and let the system do what it's supposed to do.

The open-borders crowd will read this as some kind of crackdown horror story. This is the immigration law, enforced as written. If Congress thinks the law is too harsh, Congress can change it. Until then, the men and women doing the job deserve a policy they can actually follow, and now they've got one.

The scoreboard: policy clarified, agents unblocked, everybody here illegally back on the board. Simple as that.