Trump Debates Mass Deportation With Himself
· Reason
In a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday night, President Donald Trump conceded that his mass deportation campaign may have contributed to the Republican rout in last week's midterm elections because "a lot of people think it's too tough." Yet on the same day he sat for the interview, Trump announced that he had picked Stephen Miller, the main architect of that policy, to replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff.
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Those seemingly contradictory signals reflect a conflict between Trump's "tough" instincts on immigration and his intermittent qualms about the economic and human consequences of deporting unauthorized but otherwise law-abiding residents with deep roots in their communities. Trump's ambivalence jibes with the mixed views of voters, who generally applaud efforts to police the border and expel criminals but are less comfortable with deporting peaceful and productive people who have worked and raised families in the United States for years.
Trump and his underlings have said his immigration crackdown focuses on "the worst of the worst." Yet the Cato Institute's David Bier, who looked at detainees arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in fiscal year 2026, found that 73 percent had no criminal convictions, nearly half also had no pending criminal charges, and just 5 percent had been convicted of violent offenses.
The Migration Policy Institute reported similar findings in October: During the first 18 months of Trump's second term, just one-fifth of deportees had been convicted of crimes. The organization also noted that 61 percent of deportees had lived in the United States for more than two years, while 15 percent had been here for a decade or more.
Although hardliners like Miller want to "get everybody out," Trump noted in the 60 Minutes interview, "a lot of people" think the government should deport "the rough ones," including "drug dealers," "rapists," and "killers," but "work a deal" for others, including immigrants who "in some cases" have been here for "10 and 15 years." He said a deal along those lines with the Democrats who will soon take control of Congress is "actually doable."
This is not the first time that Trump has expressed reservations about the indiscriminate approach to immigration enforcement favored by Miller. In June 2025, Trump ordered a short-lived pause on workplace raids, and the following month he said that "we're gonna work with" employers of unauthorized immigrants in the agriculture and hospitality industries.
"These people…work so hard," Trump said at a July 2025 rally in Des Moines. "They bend over all day. We don't have too many people [who] can do that."
Trump added that "some of the farmers…cry when they see [immigration raids] happen." He alluded to "cases where…people have worked for a farmer on a farm for 14, 15 years" and "then they get thrown out, pretty viciously."
Trump's conclusion: "We can't do it. We've got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties."
Trump revisited that theme on 60 Minutes. When "you have a woman" who is doing "a great job" as a waitress or a hotel cleaner, he said, "and all of a sudden, they're being taken out of the country, it's tough. It's a tough thing."
Last April, the Pew Research Center reported that 52 percent of Americans thought the Trump administration was doing "too much" when "it comes to deporting immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally." In a CBS News exit poll last week, 58 percent of voters said the Trump administration's immigration enforcement had "gone too far."
They could be right, Trump admitted in the interview: "It might be too tough." While "I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out," he said, "I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs" whose "one violation" was that "they came into the country illegally."
Will Trump follow through on these impulses? That depends on the outcome of his debate with Miller—and with himself.
© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
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