President Donald Trump has acknowledged that his deportation policy was "too tough" and may have cost him politically, in a sit-down interview with CBS's 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat. The interview, the first of its kind since last week's midterm elections, found the president describing immigration enforcement as something that both helped and hurt him.
Asked whether his deportation policies had damaged Republicans in the midterms, Trump did not offer a clean defense. He said enforcement had both helped and hurt him, and he conceded that many of the people in the country illegally are good people, a remark that drew immediate backlash from parts of his own base. At the same time, he defended his record on the border, claiming an A-plus grade for the closure of the southern border.
Trump also said that about 25 million people had entered the country under former President Joe Biden over four years, a figure he used to argue for stronger border controls. He floated the possibility of a deal on immigration with the incoming Democratic Congress and pointed to Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico as a possible partner. He did not say how such an agreement would be reached, and the prospects for a bipartisan immigration deal remain uncertain.
The remarks come after Democrats won sweeping victories in the midterms, including in Texas, a state long dominated by Republicans. Trump placed the blame for his party's losses on Republican candidates and on the war with Iran. A Fox poll found immigration to be the only issue on which Republicans held an advantage over Democrats, which makes the president's comments on enforcement politically significant.
Trump also attributed voters' negative views of the economy to "bad messaging" and touched on a range of other subjects during the interview, including corruption, UFOs, the afterlife, forgiveness and his political enemies. Those comments were less directly tied to the election outcome, but they added to a conversation in which the president was openly reassessing one of the central pillars of his first-term and current agenda.