President Donald Trump said on Sunday his immigration policy hurt the Republican Party in the midterm elections, and pressed Democrats to make a bipartisan deal with the White House that could offer legal status to “good” illegal immigrants.
Trump stood by his administration’s effort to seal the border and target violent illegal immigrants over the course of his second term during a CBS 60 Minutes interview. But he said that deporting people with “good jobs” in the hospitality industry and other blue-collar service sectors who had only committed the crime of crossing illegally hurt the GOP in last week’s elections.
“Some kind of legal status” could be afforded to such workers, the president suggested, adding that he believes the Democratic Party has people in it who would be interested in such a deal, pointing to incoming freshmen such as Sens.-elect James Talarico (D-TX) and Annie Andrews (D-SC).
“Get the killers out. Get the, get the rapists out. Get all the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out,” Trump said. “But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them, OK?”
Trump first floated an immigration deal on election night, Nov. 3, during an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns, the evening his party saw sweeping losses nationwide and lost control of both chambers in Congress. Days later, the president ousted Susie Wiles as his chief of staff and appointed Stephen Miller, his longtime adviser who is viewed as one of the sternest immigration hardliners in the White House.
The White House has so far deported around 1 million people. Polling ahead of the midterm elections indicated Trump’s deportation moves have been unpopular with the majority of the public.
During his latest interview, Trump said there is a “group of people on the pretty far-right that would like everybody taken out,” but that there is a “large part” of the country that disagrees with deporting people without criminal records. When pressed on whether any of those pushing for mass removals worked in his administration, the president answered in the affirmative.
Trump acknowledged that his crackdown on illegal immigrants had both “helped and hurt” Republicans in the midterm elections, saying that his deportation policy was “too tough” when it came to removing “good people” who don’t have criminal records from the United States. He named hotel workers as one example, arguing it’s a “tough thing” to deport maids, cleaners, and waitresses.
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“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,” Trump said. “A lotta people would say that it’s great. But a lotta people think it’s too tough.”
“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,” he continued. “There’s a large group of people [who] think that they should be allowed to stay.”