President Donald Trump said his administration’s immigration policies “both helped and hurt” Republicans, following a monumental loss for his party in November’s midterm elections.
In a post-election interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes with Ross Douthat, Trump described his immigration strategy as “too tough.”
“I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump told Douthat on Sunday. “I think I got an A+ for closing up the border, I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out, but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation . . . there is a large part of the country that thinks they should be put out, and there’s a large part of the country that thinks that they should be allowed to stay.”
The president also said, going forward, one issue he is willing to work with Democrats on is immigration, following Democrats’ gaining control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the midterms.
In discussing the possibility of an immigration deal with Democrats, Trump acknowledged the removal of illegal immigrants who had been in the country for years and held jobs. He floated the idea that those who have established themselves in the U.S. could be allowed to stay under some new form of legal status, calling a compromise of this type “doable” with Democrats.
Trump said people in the Democratic Party have already “called [him]” to say they would be interested in working with the administration to make a deal like this possible for these types of illegal immigrants.
“In some cases [these illegal immigrants are] paying taxes,” the president said. “There’s a large group of people that think they should be allowed to stay. . . . When you go into a hotel and you have a woman who has worked there as a maid, a cleaner, a waitress, a lot of good jobs. And all of a sudden they are being taken out of the country, it’s tough.”
The president conceded that many people on the “pretty far right” still support deporting every illegal immigrant in the U.S.
The Trump administration has long touted its aggressive deportation strategy, particularly through a pointed media campaign and hype videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers deporting illegal immigrants in the U.S.
Since the president took office, more than 605,000 people have been deported, with another almost 2 million more self-deporting, according to the administration’s numbers. For the first time in more than 50 years, the U.S. is experiencing a net loss in migration.
Upon initiating widespread deportations across the U.S., thousands of Americans began protesting ICE, especially following ICE’s deployment to sanctuary cities. These protests, and the related violence, increased the controversy of the entire operation.
During the 2024 presidential race, 41 percent of Americans said immigration was an “extremely important” issue, while today the number is 31 percent, according to Gallup.