Trump admits ICE crackdown went too far and suggests amnesty after midterms disaster
President Donald Trump has admitted his federal crackdown on illegal immigrants went too far and may have alienated voters at last week’s midterms, which saw Democrats take back control of Congress.
Speaking to correspondent Ross Douthat for Sunday night’s instalment of 60 Minutes on CBS News – his first major interview since Tuesday’s crushing defeat for Republicans – Trump said of the crackdown: “I think it was too tough.”
“I think it might be too tough, yeah,” he continued. “And a lot of people would say that it’s great. But a lot of people think it’s too tough.”
Despite the admission, the president appears unlikely to further rein in his approach now that he has appointed Stephen Miller to be his next White House chief of staff, with the immigration hardliner replacing Susie Wiles.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have not received any instructions to revise their tactics in response to the midterms results, according to CBS, despite the outcome being widely interpreted as a sharp rebuke of Trump’s policies.
“I would count on the opposite,” one official told the network in light of Miller’s ascent, hinting that the round-up and arrest of undocumented migrants will continue at pace.
A key reason for Trump’s re-election in 2024 was voter discontent over Joe Biden’s perceived failures on immigration, with many Americans attracted by the Republican promising a mass deportation push to drive out people in the country illegally, whom he portrayed as a menace to society.
However, there was backlash when masked ICE agents began to surge into Democrat run cities like Los Angeles and Chicago and targeted migrant communities, raiding homes and workplaces, arresting people without criminal records and spreading fear.
The unease boiled over into anger when two U.S. citizens were shot dead in the snowy streets of Minneapolis in January while protesting their actions.
That culminated in the removal of DHS secretary Kristi Noem, her top adviser Corey Lewandowski and Customs and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino from positions of power and a scaling back of federal agents’ activities as attention switched to the Iran war.
The president admitted to Douthat that his immigration strategy had “both helped and hurt” his administration, insisting he deserved an A+ grade for securing the southern border with Mexico.
Asked where his approach had backfired, Trump answered: “For getting people out, 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, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.
“Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. And there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.”
