Reversing the massive Biden inflow of illegal migrants remains a work in progress, but a necessary one — with getting as many possible to leave voluntarily quite vital.

President Trump stopped the wave cold in his first days in office, putting the lie to Democrats’ claims that the border couldn’t be secured without new laws, and it remains stopped (at least until Dems regain power).

But former President Joe Biden waved in millions of “asylum seekers,” and millions more jumped the border while border agents were tied up processing the influx.

Getting them all out, without dangerous and chaotic mass ICE raids, is hard work, made all the tougher by Democrats’ continued resistance to any enforcement at all.

Which is why the feds need to push them to go home on their own.

Homeland Security reports that of the 3 million-plus illegals who left the country during Year 1 of Trump’s second term, about 73% (some 2.2 million) self-deported. 

Part of that is the realization that staying forever won’t be as it once seemed; another is new financial incentives.

DHS has issued more than 100,000 fines to illegals who have failed to comply with final removal orders. These fines clock in at $998 per day of overstay; the fines now total in the billions.

On the other side of the equation, non-criminal self-deportees face no fines or asset confiscation and (unlike those forcibly removed) remain eligible for legal re-entry; the government even makes subsidized flights home available. 

Team Trump lets would-be self-deportees use the CBP Home app to arrange their departure; it’s a wonderful repurpose of the insane Biden-era CBP One app that let would-be illegal migrants schedule their border jumps. 

How perfect: The purpose of Trump’s border policy must be to undo the damage Biden did and (insofar as possible) make sure it can’t happen again.

Sending in federal agents to go toe to toe with antifa thugs and blue-city progs, however merited, has not proven an effective means of making that happen. 

Setting aside tragedies like the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, encouraged to interfere with legitimate law-enforcement operations, the political risks are vast.

The street battles in Minneapolis are, justly or not, a main reason why support for ICE has cratered in recent polling, even as support for getting most of the Biden wave gone (especially the worst of them) remains high.

Nor will blue-state and -city elected officials pay any price from their voters for resisting ICE, no matter how deeply unjust it is to both US citizens and legal immigrants. 

Focusing on quieter administrative levers to encourage deportation is not only smart — it’s massively effective.

Plus: Even as ICE draws back from more confrontational tactics, its overall arrest numbers are up.

The administration has posted other quiet wins beyond the civil-fine initiative, for example killing a Biden-era rule that stopped many types of welfare assistance from counting as making a migrant a “public charge” and so ineligible for further legalization.

Trump’s refusal to extend “Temporary” Protected Status to various migrant groups, decades after the disruptions back home that once justified that mercy, is another marker that end-running the immigration laws isn’t the easy win it once seemed for the open-borders crowd: All these issues need rethinking when the nation finally starts to settle on a rational new approach to immigration.

Biden waved in far too many migrants by ignoring the spirit of the laws; humanely sending the overwhelming majority of them home is absolutely necessary to getting the nation to where it can finally agree on new laws to admit the immigrants America needs in an orderly and sustainable way.