Trump Admits on "60 Minutes" Sunday That His Mass Deportation Policy "Might Be Too Tough" and Hurt Republicans in Tuesday's Midterm Rout, and Floats a Deal With Democrats to Let Workers Who've Been Here "10 and 15 Years" Stay
Monday, November 9, 2026
President Trump's mass deportation drive is, by his own account, the one part of his record that cut both ways. Asked on 60 Minutes what he would like to work on with a Democratic majority, he answered without hesitating: "I'd love to do something on immigration." Asked whether the crackdown hurt him in the midterms, he said: "I think it both helped and hurt. I think I got an A+ for closing up the border. 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." The country, he said, is split down the middle on those people: "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 workin' in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes." Then came the admission. Douthat pressed: "So you think your deportation policy went too far?" Trump cut in: "Too tough." "It was too tough?" — "I think it might be too tough, yeah."
From that admission, Trump moved straight to the deal he says is now within reach. "That hurt me," he said of the crackdown's cost in the midterms. "Well, the deal would be we would work something out. And I think that's something that's actually doable." Douthat asked whether "doable" meant some kind of legal status "for the landscapers and the" workers in those jobs — "Yeah," Trump said. He gave the human case himself: "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 lotta good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden, they're being taken outta the country, it's tough. It's a tough thing." And he says the other side is already reaching out. Asked whether the Democratic Party has people who would be interested in this kind of deal, Trump answered: "I think so, yeah. People have already called me." Douthat raised Senator James Talarico, the new Democratic senator from Texas, who said on Fox News that immigration is one of the things he wants to work with Trump on; Trump said Talarico "said very nice things," and added: "Others too. South Carolina said. Numerous people that won."
The resistance, on Trump's own telling, sits inside his own camp. "There's a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out," he said — and asked whether any of those people work in his administration, he answered: "Yes." The other group, he said, is "more modified": "Get the killers out. Get all the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out. But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for ten and 15 years — work a deal for them." Where the idea stands today must be stated as plainly as the idea itself: there is no bill, no text and no terms. What exists is a president saying on television that a deal is doable, that Democrats have called him, and that the shape of it would be legal status for long-settled workers — nothing on paper yet, and nothing agreed.
What this means: the people at the centre of this are not abstractions — they are the workers Trump himself described: the hotel maid, the cleaner, the waitress, the landscaping crews, many of them here ten and fifteen years and, in his own words, "in some cases, paying taxes." For those households, a deal is the difference between a life that can be planned and a knock that can come any day; for the hotels, landscapers and restaurants that employ them, it is the difference between a workforce that stays and one held under constant removal. And on Trump's own framing, none of it touches the part of the record he grades highest: the border stays closed — his "A+" — and the killers, the rough ones and the drug dealers still go. The deal he is floating is only about who is already here.
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