Trump Says Deportation Drive Was ‘Too Tough’ After Midterm Losses

President Donald Trump has conceded that his mass deportation programme went too far, telling CBS’s 60 Minutes that the crackdown was “too tough” and that it hurt Republicans in last week’s midterm elections.

The interview, taped on Friday and broadcast on Sunday, was Mr Trump’s first major sit-down since his party lost control of Congress. Asked by correspondent Ross Douthat whether the deportation policy had gone too far, the president answered directly.

“I think it was too tough,” he said. “I think it might be too tough. Yeah.”

It was an unusually frank admission about one of the defining policies of his second term — and it came days after voters handed the House and the Senate to the Democrats.

“It both helped and hurt”

Mr Trump said the policy had cut both ways for his party. “I think it both helped and hurt,” he told Douthat, adding that he deserved top marks for shutting down illegal crossings while acknowledging the political damage done by the removals themselves.

“I got an A+ for closing up the border,” he said. “I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.”

The problem, in his telling, was the breadth of the net. “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,” he said.

He singled out immigrants who have lived in the United States for ten years or more without committing serious crimes, and workers in landscaping companies and hotels who, in some cases, pay taxes. A large group of people think they should be allowed to stay, he said.

The president also blamed the way the policy had been explained to voters. Pressed on what the “bad message” had been, he said: “We couldn’t get the word across.”

A deal with Democrats?

The interview also opened a door Mr Trump has kept firmly shut for much of his presidency: a negotiated immigration deal with the incoming Democratic Congress.

He said he would “love to do something on immigration” and, when asked whether a deal could include creating legal status for some undocumented workers, indicated that it could. He added that he believed an agreement with the new Democratic majority was achievable, allowing some long-term residents to stay while removals of people convicted of serious crimes continued.

He gave no specifics about what such a deal would look like, and no timetable. The Guardian reported that he described the arrangement only in broad terms, saying: “The deal would be we would work something out.”

The offer lands as Democrats prepare to take both chambers in January, after winning control of both houses of Congress in the midterms. The Gazette noted that Mr Trump said he thought he could work with the new majority on immigration, even as the two parties remain far apart on the details.

The Miller contradiction

There is an obvious tension in the president’s message, and it appeared within hours of the interview being recorded.

About an hour after the conversation was taped on Friday, Mr Trump named Stephen Miller chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. Mr Miller is the architect of the mass deportation policy — the same policy the president had just described as too tough.

The appointment was reported as a promotion for the administration’s hardest-line voice on immigration, and it sits uneasily alongside the president’s talk of a deal. It also raises a practical question: who, inside the White House, would actually negotiate one?

The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, has shown no sign of easing off. “ICE is NOT backing away or slowing down,” the department said, making clear that enforcement operations would continue at their current pace regardless of the president’s televised second thoughts.

What happens next

For now, the interview changes the politics of immigration more than the policy. The president has publicly acknowledged, for the first time, that the deportation drive cost his party votes. He has also said he is willing to talk to Democrats about legal status for some of the people it targeted.

Whether that becomes a real negotiation depends on two things neither side has yet shown: a concrete proposal from the White House, and a Democratic leadership willing to trade. The new Congress does not take its seats until January, and the president’s own chief of staff is the man who designed the crackdown.

The 60 Minutes conversation ranged beyond immigration, covering Iran, artificial intelligence, Mr Trump’s potential successors and his own mortality. But it is the deportation admission that will shape the weeks ahead — a president conceding his signature policy went too far, while handing its enforcement to the person who built it.