Days after the midterm election, President Donald Trump appeared to backtrack on his mass deportation campaign and said he wants to make a deal with Democrats on immigration.
In a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday, the president said the deportation raids may have gone too far.
“I think it was too tough. I think it might be too tough, yeah. I think ultimately that hurt me,” he said.
Trump said he would “love” to make a deal with Democrats. That deal would entail giving some form of legal status to non-criminal illegal immigrants who are working and paying taxes in the United States, he said.
“The deal would be we would work something out, and I think that’s something that’s actually doable,” Trump said.
“When you go into a hotel, and you have a woman that’s worked there as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lot of good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden they’re being taken out of the country, it’s tough, it’s a tough thing. But there’s a group of people that I would say on the pretty far right that would like everybody taken out,” Trump said, adding that there are such immigration hawks within his administration.
One of the fiercest advocates of mass deportations is Stephen Miller, whom the president promoted last week to White House chief of staff after Susie Wiles’ departure.
Miller, who has been characterized as the architect of the mass deportation campaign, has pushed for broader immigration arrests. He has at times clashed with other senior Trump administration officials over enforcement tactics and messaging.
Trump also acknowledged that there are “people that are more modified” on deportations.
His own border czar, Tom Homan, has advocated for prioritizing the arrest and removal of individuals with criminal histories and final deportation orders, The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
“In other words, get the killers out, get all the rough ones out, get all the drug dealers out, but let the people that are here and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them,” Trump said.
Trump said he is already getting calls from Democrats interested in brokering such a deal.
In a Fox News midterm poll, 58% of voters said they believed Trump’s actions on immigration enforcement went “too far.” Roughly 60% of voters disapproved of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) job performance, according to the poll.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, federal authorities, including ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Coast Guard, have arrested over 1.25 million illegal immigrants and deported nearly 1.2 million illegal immigrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
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