Trump tells CBS’s 60 Minutes he gets an ‘A-plus’ for closing up the border. Then he says his deportation policy ‘might be too tough’
President Donald Trump said his hardline approach to immigration enforcement and deportations might have been too tough on people who have lived in the country for a decade or more. He made the comments to Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes, according to CBS, three days after Republicans lost both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections.
Trump said the crackdown helped and hurt him at the polls, claiming an A+ for closing up the border. However, he said he lost ground as the administration took people with good jobs whose only offense was entering illegally. A large part of the country thinks those immigrants should stay if they work and, in some cases, pay taxes, he said.
Many people would call the policy great, he said, while many others think it is too harsh. “I think it was too tough,” Donald Trump said. The interview took place the same day he named Stephen Miller as chief of staff, a hardliner widely viewed as an architect of policies that include rapid deportations to third-world countries.
Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024 seem to have turned on Republicans this time
Republican support dropped sharply in South Texas and other heavily Latino areas that had trended toward the party two years ago. Many voters in those areas reportedly tied that reversal partly to the immigration crackdown. Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of South Florida warned weeks before the election that many Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 “feel betrayed.”
Exit polling shows that 58% of voters think the administration’s actions on immigration have gone too far. However, voters still trust Republicans slightly more than Democrats to handle the issue, by 43% to 41%. The administration has defended its methods, saying it is targeting public safety threats.
Federal officials have increased arrests and deportations inside the country, with the number of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement hitting record highs. Miller pushed the agency to aim for 3,000 arrests per day last year. Those numbers have drawn scrutiny as a large share of the people arrested do not have criminal records beyond immigration offenses.
Trump also said he would love to do something on immigration with congressional Democrats. It remains unclear whether the administration plans to change its enforcement strategy. His 2024 victory was fueled partly by voter frustration with former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, and illegal border crossings have fallen sharply since Trump returned to the White House.
There’s already a narrow legal path for immigrants who’ve been here 10 years
The 10-year mark Trump described carries weight as federal law already treats a decade as a threshold. Under cancellation of removal, an immigration judge can halt the deportation of someone without legal status who has lived in the US continuously for at least 10 years.
Applicants must also show good moral character and that removal would cause “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a spouse, parent, or child who is a citizen or green card holder. Congress caps those grants at 4,000 a year.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that more than 90,000 ICE deportations during Trump’s first 18 months back in office, about 15% of the agency’s total, involved immigrants who had lived in the US for 10 years or more. That works out to roughly 60,000 a year, far above the annual cap on cancellation grants.
Democrats will take control of both chambers when the new Congress convenes in January, which means any immigration deal Trump hopes to strike would likely need their votes.
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