President Donald Trump has said his immigration crackdown may have hurt Republicans in last week’s midterm elections, calling the deportation drive “too tough” in his first television interview since the vote.
Trump spoke to CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview broadcast on Sunday evening. He told correspondent Ross Douthat that immigration had “both helped and hurt” his party, and gave himself an “A plus” for closing the border while conceding that the deportations that followed had damaged Republicans at the ballot box.
“I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out,” Trump said. “But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.”
Democrats won sweeping majorities in Congress in the midterm elections on 3 November. Latino voters in states such as Texas swung sharply towards Democrats after backing Republicans in 2024, according to election day polling. An Associated Press survey of more than 100,000 voters found about six in ten believed the administration’s immigration enforcement had gone too far.
Trump said he would welcome an immigration deal with Democrats, who take control of both chambers in January. “I think that’s something that’s actually doable,” he said.
The White House gave no sign of a policy change on Sunday. A spokeswoman told the BBC the administration would not slow its efforts to arrest and deport people in the country illegally who commit crimes, and the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement was “not backing away or slowing down”.
Trump has also named Stephen Miller, the architect of the deportation policy, as his new chief of staff from Monday.
Source: Fox News
