In an interview on “60 Minutes” this past Sunday, President Donald Trump acknowledged that his tough approach to deportations — which included arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants with no criminal records — was likely one of the reasons his party suffered major losses in the midterms.
“I think it might be too tough, yeah,” he said. “That hurt me.”
During the interview, Trump also mentioned that he would be open to working out a deal for undocumented immigrants who have no criminal records and have been in the U.S. “for 10 and 15 years.” This was a major departure from his hardline rhetoric on immigration, which has often painted undocumented immigrants as criminals who need to be sent back to their home countries (or, in some instances, countries they’d never heard of).
His administration gave ICE sweeping authority to arrest and detain immigrants, leading to massive operations in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, and even the tragic deaths of American citizens protesting immigration enforcement.
Although Trump seems to be walking back his most extreme rhetoric on immigration, let’s not mistake that for a newly developed sense of compassion for the people he’s been willing to treat so inhumanely. It’s far more likely that Trump is realizing that he went so far with his immigration crackdown that it’s now hurting the very communities that voted for him.
He’s been put in the rare position of having to acknowledge that one of his signature policies might have backfired, and that he didn’t think things all the way through. But even then, Trump’s main concern seems to be how much it hurt him politically, rather than the people whose lives he’s upended.
He also might have realized that undocumented immigrants are, in many ways, the backbone of the American economy. Undocumented workers account for 25% of the country’s farmworkers, 17% of construction workers and 12% of workers in food preparation and serving, according to Cornell University’s Worker Institute. And contrary to false claims that undocumented immigrants don’t pay taxes, they actually contributed $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. In other words, these are people whose labor and financial contributions the country has relied on for decades, even as Trump has spent years vilifying them.
Ultimately, though, Trump seems to be changing the way he speaks about undocumented immigrants, rather than actually wanting to change his policies. One of the clearest indicators is that he just promoted Stephen Miller, one of the main architects of his immigration crackdown, to White House chief of staff.
Miller’s own biographer, Jean Guerrero, has called him a “sadist” who “takes pleasure in inflicting pain,” and that “there’s one group of people he actually despises more than immigrants, and people aren’t really aware of this, but it’s the allies of immigrants — it’s citizens who use their privilege to stand up for immigrants and for the less powerful.”
If Trump truly believes his immigration policies have gone too far, elevating one of their biggest proponents is a strange way of showing it. For now, it seems the president is more interested in changing the political consequences of his crackdown than the crackdown itself.