Trump says his immigration crackdown ‘might be too tough’ after midterm losses

President Trump on Sunday said his deportation policies might have been “too tough” and led to the GOP’s historic losses in this year’s elections.

CBS News’s Ross Douthat asked the president on “60 Minutes” if his immigration policy lost his party the midterms.

“I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump responded. “I think I got an A plus for closing up the border. 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 for breaking of the law, that was what they came into the country illegally.”

“Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out,” he continued. “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.”

The president later went on to characterize his immigration policy as “too tough” and expressed interest in working across the aisle in the next Congress, when both chambers will be under Democratic control.

Deportations have been a key focus for the second Trump administration – but it may have cost Trump politically.

In a July survey the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 39 percent of respondents approved of the administration’s handling of immigration, a 10-point drop from the start of his second term.

Americans have developed increasingly negative views of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), especially following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year in Minneapolis, which led to widespread backlash and protests nationwide .

Many Democratic lawmakers have condemned the president’s action on immigration – but some Republican lawmakers have also shared their concerns and foresaw the president’s immigration crackdown as a liability.

“Once you start deporting people who have otherwise been here without incident for 15, 20 years, that’s a gray zone that I think where you find a lot of division of opinion,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in early October.

Cornyn was up for re-election but lost the Republican primary to Trump-backed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. He was defeated on Tuesday by the now Sen.-elect James Talarico (D-Texas), who was critical of ICE’s actions throughout his campaign..

“We need Immigration and Customs Enforcement in this country, but that’s not what we’re seeing,” Talarico said at a town hall in October. “What we’ve seen over the last year is a secret police force, and that’s what we don’t want in this country.”