Donald Trump bent to reality last week, issuing an order that amounts to a stunning turnaround on his "mass deportation" policy. Instead of rounding up every undocumented immigrant in sight everywhere, ICE will now back off on raiding farms, meatpacking plants, hotels, and restaurants. Because the reality of the situation is that if you removed all the undocumented immigrants from these industries, they would essentially grind to a halt. Which Trump has (thankfully) now finally realized.

In typical Trumpian fashion, this was not a well-thought-out plan which was carefully implemented, it was an off-the-cuff decision Trump made after talking to one person. So it remains to be seen what the impact of it all will be, as the dust settles.

Last week, ICE raids made the news in a big way in Los Angeles, with raids on garment factories and a local Home Depot making the biggest headlines. But ICE also started raiding farms and rounding up farmworkers in Oxnard, an agricultural region up the coast from Los Angeles. Other California counties were also targets of farm raids as well. And the reaction was immediate: "Growers reported that 30 to 60 percent of workers stopped reporting to the fields in the days after the raids." It is estimated that undocumented immigrants make up over 40 percent of the nation's farmworkers, just for reference.

If the raids had continued and spread across all of California's (and the nation's) agricultural regions, then immigrants would have stopped working the fields everywhere, for fear of being rounded up. The labor force would have been cut in half (if not more), which would mean a whole lot of work just would not get done. This would directly lead to crops rotting in the fields, farmers having to plow fields under because they did not have enough labor to harvest the crops, and shortages of produce in the supermarkets (along with skyrocketing prices). This stuff ain't rocket science, folks. It's pretty easy to predict the outcome of such widespread raids, in fact.

Farmers -- most of whom vote Republican -- promptly freaked out. They have reportedly been "bombarding their Senate and congressional offices to voice concerns." Which must have filtered upward to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who picked up the phone and gave Trump a call:

On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.

Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Farmers rely on immigrants to work long hours, Ms. Rollins said. She told the president that farm groups had been warning her that their employees would stop showing up to work out of fear, potentially crippling the agricultural industry.

Fortunately, she convinced him. Trump posted soon afterwards on social media:

Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.

He then followed up by telling a reporter:

Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years. They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great. And we're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not.

That's right -- Donald Trump just called undocumented immigrants "great." Not only is he backing down on the policy, he is performing a complete turnaround in his rhetoric as well. He is finally (slowly) realizing that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants work very hard, are good people, and they form the backbone of several important American industries. If you take them away, those industries will not be able to hire Americans to do the same work, period. So the work just will not get done.

An ICE memo went out soon after, telling all the regional ICE offices: "Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels."

Because the entire policy shift happened so quickly, without any planning or coordination, it caught others in Trump's inner circle by surprise. The "round them all up" faction is reportedly apoplectic about this change in policy, and Trump has even been getting pushback from some of his MAGA followers who were blindsided by Trump backing down in such dramatic fashion. They've been getting a nonstop message that all immigrants are criminals and murderers and rapists and now all of a sudden Trump is calling large groups of them "very good" and "great." You can understand their ideological whiplash at having to process this new shift in Trump's thinking.

ICE still hasn't quite gotten on board with the new policy, as it was reported that farm raids continued in Oxnard on Friday, the day after the new ICE memo went out. But by this week, they'll probably be working within the new guidelines. What this will do to their quest to reach Stephen Miller's announced quota of 3,000 arrests per day is anyone's guess -- farmworkers, meatpacking plants, restaurants and hotels employ a lot of immigrants. If ICE can't raid any of them, they'll have to increase their raids in other areas and economic sectors.

This may lead to a parade of big business owners and industry lobbyists trying to convince Trump to include their own industries in the ICE raid ban. This reportedly already happened, as the restaurant industry saw Trump's comments on farmworkers and reached out to him so quickly and so successfully that Trump included restaurants and hotels in the official order (even though he had not directly referred to these industries in his earlier comments). There are plenty of other industries (construction is a good example) who heavily rely on immigrant labor -- perhaps not to the degree that the agricultural industry does, but still to a significant degree -- that all must be inundating the White House with calls right now, to avoid massive disruptions in their own labor forces. Will we see a steadily-growing list of industries that are exempt from ICE raids, or was this a one-time policy shift that won't change? Nobody knows, at this point.

A better answer would be for Congress to debate and pass an immigration reform bill that addressed the reality of immigrant labor in America in a sane and reasonable way, but I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

Even so, the shift in rhetoric as Trump is forced to back down is a welcome one, I have to say. Trump has long focused exclusively on the bad apples, never admitting that the vast majority of immigrants are just here to raise a family and make a better life for themselves. Even with their focus on arresting criminals, two-thirds of the people ICE has picked up under Trump have no criminal record at all. That's because most immigrants are not criminals. Most immigrants work hard -- very hard -- doing jobs nobody else will do (certainly not for the pittance they are paid to do it). Now that farmworkers, meatpackers, waitresses, maids, cooks, and dishwashers have been identified as being the essential workers that they are, the door is open for others to be included in the "great" category of undocumented workers.

To tell the truth, I did expect Trump to cave on farmworker raids. The reality of it all is so inescapable -- if undocumented workers are either rounded up or too scared to go to work, then the entire food industry would have been at serious risk of collapsing. Prices would soar, there would be shortages, all while good food rotted in the fields. But I have to say, I was completely surprised at how quickly Trump did back down. I expected the whole thing to take months before Trump admitted defeat and was forced to create some sort of carve-out for farmworkers (let alone restaurant or hotel workers). So I have to applaud the Agriculture secretary for so effectively making the case to Trump that he immediately backed down. Doing so will (hopefully) avoid widespread disruptions in the harvest and the accompanying widespread impact on the food supply. I'm even hopeful that other industries will eventually be added to the list, since immigrants are so vital to the American workforce in so many different areas.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant