As we mentioned Monday, immigration is one of the principal reasons for the rise of Donald Trump. But his campaign really stepped in it over the weekend when his new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, waffled on the deportation force. Trump himself didn’t help matters Monday night, when he said, “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country, Bush the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m gonna do the same thing.” Trump is a lot of things but status quo isn’t supposed to be one of them — “I’m gonna do the same thing” as Barack Obama and George W. Bush isn’t what won him the nomination. But not to worry; the wall is still happening. “We’re going to build the wall,” Trump told a rally also on Monday. “That wall will go up so fast, your head will spin. And you’ll say, ‘You know, he meant it.’ And you know what else I mean? Mexico is going to pay for the wall.”

The editors at National Review conclude that Trump’s mass deportation plan “perversely combines support for a fantastical policy of deportation of all illegal immigrants — an administrative impossibility — with a soft-headed ‘touch-back’ amnesty that would allow some portion of the deportees to return to America with legal status. If deported illegal immigrants are going to come right back, it makes little sense to deport them in the first place.” Trump is right that enforcing existing law is key, but Obama is hardly the model. Enforcement at the border and via work requirements leads to fewer illegals coming and staying. Then we can sort out what to do with those who’ve been here for decades and aren’t leaving.

Will Trump shift from his position in the primaries? It’s hard to tell, but reports are the Trump has canceled his Thursday immigration speech as he sorts out the confusion internally.