President Donald Trump is facing blowback from some conservatives who say he has turned his back on his aggressive stance against illegal immigration after his comments on Sunday hinting at his openness to making an amnesty-like deal with Democrats.
Conservative commentators and MAGA figures balked at Trump’s admission during a CBS News 60 Minutes interview, which aired Sunday evening, that he would “love” to work with the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to provide legal status to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States who do not have criminal histories.
The 31-member House Freedom Caucus flat-out rejected Trump’s pitch on Monday.
“NO AMNESTY,” the House Freedom Caucus wrote in a post to X. “NO AMNESTY GARBAGE UNDER ANY OTHER NAME.”
NO AMNESTY.
NO AMNESTY-LITE.
NO AMNESTY GARBAGE UNDER ANY OTHER NAME.— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) November 9, 2026
Conservative media personality and podcast host Megyn Kelly reacted on X to the interview with, “And now amnesty. Seriously?”
Nalin Haley, the son of former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, said Trump had betrayed his base.
“If you were to tell everyone 10 years ago today, on the day Trump was elected President, that he would be talking to democrats about an amnesty deal 10 years later no one would believe you,” Haley wrote on X.
Fox News’s Tomi Lahren blasted Trump in a lengthy post Monday morning and argued that legalizing people who were illegally in the country would hurt U.S. jobs and lower wages, among other outcomes.
“This notion that because an illegal has evaded the law for 15 years they get some kind of a pass or a gold star is utterly ridiculous,” Lahren wrote in the post. “So no, I don’t think deportations have gone too far. They haven’t gone nearly far enough. And now that this message is going out, coupled with the fact that we have border states that have turned blue, get ready for the next wave of the Third World to be welcomed to the gates.”
Steve Cortes, a senior adviser and spokesman who led Hispanic outreach for Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, posted that “If President Trump softens on immigration enforcement, it will be a disaster.”
But the White House’s Rapid Response account on X posted a statement defending how Trump outlined the proposal.
“Wrong. The word ‘amnesty’ was never even said in this entire exchange,” the account responded to a post from the Blaze criticizing Trump.
Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat that federal immigration officers had arrested illegal immigrants who were otherwise law-abiding residents in the U.S., in addition to the “worst of the worst” whom he had promised to go after first as president.
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“Now 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 working in a hotel or doing something, right, and in some cases paying taxes — there’s a large group of people who think that they should be allowed to stay,” Trump said.
Trump said his immigration policy hurt Republicans in the midterm elections and said he would be willing to work with Democrats to make a deal that could bestow legal status on “good” illegal immigrants.