Trump backs away from hardline immigration policy after midterms blowout: ‘I think it was too tough’

President Trump admitted his hardline immigration policy went too far after the GOP’s sweeping losses in the midterm elections last week.

Trump said his administration’s rapid deportations turned off some Americans during a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, following Republicans losing the Hispanic vote last Tuesday.

“For getting people out, I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out,” he said. “But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that– that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.”

Latino voters who swung to the right in 2024 reversed course in Tuesday’s elections, shifting dramatically to the left. In battleground states with large Hispanic populations, like Texas, Democrats won governorships and Senate seats.

When it came to closing the southern border, however, Trump gave himself “an A+.”

He’s really a pioneer in doing unorthodox things and get away with it. since he’s not a democrat, he can give us “free money” if he chooses to write a check.

Being a teflon don, he was fantastic in criticize and slamming republicans much better than a liberal could ever do.

i never thought we’d get an Indian first lady this soon.

Trump essentially minimized effectiveness and maximized backlash. Instead of trying to leverage the political moment for new laws and a self-deportation agenda (that is, walling off the economy to remove the benefit of irregular presence in the US), he opted for a maximally aggressive approach. Instead of enacting universal E-Verify, Trump spent attention, funds, legal manpower on stunts like deporting random people to Salvadoran prisons with essentially no due process. ICE and Border Patrol were encouraged to be aggressive and confrontational, which helped contribute to the shooting deaths of American protestors. It turns out, that’s extremely unpopular!
What about the approach of going after employers? The obvious vector? Trump hated that idea! He repeatedly has said he doesn’t want to target businesses (especially farms) that use large amounts of illegal labor. This is just an incomprehensible position. Instead of charging a few dozen businessmen and removing the incentive for millions of illegal workers to be here, you arrest people off the street one by one at the cost of thousands of dollars in manpower per each, while their crying wives and kids post TikToks about it.
He turned an electoral strength into a crippling electoral weakness in exchange for deporting maybe 6% of the illegal population.

“ read polls which said that the only issue on which voters favored Republicans over Democrats was immigration.
And that’s the issue that Trump’s backing away from?”
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Pretty damn strange. I sure hope that these “quotes” are being taken out of context.

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