WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said his administration’s deportation policy may have gone too far, in his first extended interview since Republicans lost last week’s midterm elections, according to a transcript of his CBS News 60 Minutes interview published on Sunday.
Asked by interviewer Ross Douthat whether the deportation policy had been too tough, Trump said, according to the transcript: “I think it might be too tough, yeah.” He said the crackdown had both helped and hurt his party. He said he deserved high marks for closing the border and for removing people he described as dangerous, but that the policy had also hurt Republicans because officers removed people who held good jobs and whose only offence, he said, was entering the country illegally.
Trump said many of those people had lived in the United States for 10 or 15 years, worked in hotels, landscaping and other services, and in some cases paid taxes. He said he would like to work with Democrats on a deal that would let long-serving workers stay legally while the government continued to remove people involved in serious crime and drug dealing. He gave no details of what such a deal would contain, and the Department of Homeland Security has said immigration enforcement operations will not slow down, according to the BBC.
On the midterm result itself, Trump blamed several factors. He said he was not on the ballot, and he pointed to the war with Iran, higher fuel prices and voter unhappiness as reasons Republicans lost ground. Democrats took control of Congress in the November 3 elections, and the interview was the president’s first long public accounting of the defeat. It was recorded on Friday and broadcast on Sunday evening.
The interview also touched on the war in Ukraine, days before Ukrainian, Russian and American delegations meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday for United States mediated talks, the first such meeting since February, according to CBS. Trump said he believed a deal to end the war was close and named the hostility between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin of Russia as the biggest obstacle. He said Ukraine would end up, in his words, with “a little bit different shape,” leaving open the possibility that Kyiv would give up territory in a settlement. He declined to say which of the two leaders he trusted more.
One detail underlined how fast the White House is changing. Hours after the interview was recorded, the administration announced that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would be replaced by Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff widely described as the architect of the mass deportation policy. That move suggests the hard line on enforcement will keep strong backing inside the White House even as the president talks about a deal, analysts noted in early reaction to the interview.
Why it matters: the president’s words are the clearest sign yet that the White House sees the deportation drive as a political cost after the midterms, and they open a possible, if narrow, path to an immigration compromise with the new Democratic majority in Congress. What happens next will be tested in two places at once, in Washington, where Democrats are preparing oversight of the administration, and in Abu Dhabi, where the Ukraine talks will show whether the president’s confidence in a near deal is shared by Kyiv and Moscow.
