President Trump acknowledged that his hard-line immigration agenda may have gone too far after Republicans suffered sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections.
During a Sunday interview on “60 Minutes,” Trump said the administration’s aggressive deportation campaign had alienated some voters. His comments came after Republicans lost ground among Hispanic voters in Tuesday’s elections.
“I think it was too tough,” Trump said when asked about his deportation policy.
“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.”
Hispanic voters who moved toward the Republican Party in 2024 shifted sharply back to the left in Tuesday’s elections. In battleground states with sizable Latino populations, including Texas, Democrats captured governorships and Senate seats.
Democrats ultimately won control of both the House and Senate. Hispanic voters, who had supported Trump in large numbers during the 2024 election, were a key factor in the historic sweep.
According to The AP Voter Poll, which surveyed more than 100,000 midterm voters, only one in three Hispanic voters said they supported a Republican in their local US House race Tuesday. About four in 10 had voted for Trump two years earlier.
Political commentator Samantha Karlin told The Post last week that Trump’s immigration crackdown may have prompted Latino voters to reject Republican candidates.
“There’s a profound difference between supporting border security and watching people who look like you, your family, and your neighbors being targeted by aggressive immigration enforcement,” she said.
Karlin said the fear that a person or someone they love could be detained, regardless of legal status, creates “tremendous insecurity.”
Trump, however, gave himself an “A+” for his efforts to shut down the southern border.
“Nobody—in the last 17 months, just came out, zero people came in through our southern border, as opposed to 25 million people—25 million people. They came in through caravans,” he said during the CBS interview.
“Nobody ever saw anything like it.”
