Politics

“I Think It Was Too Tough”: Trump’s Surprise Deportation Admission After the Midterm Drubbing

November 9, 2026

A red cap left on an interview-set desk. AI illustration / Shadow Dossier.

For a decade, tough immigration enforcement has been the signature of Donald Trump’s politics. On Sunday, Nov. 8, the president said out loud that it may have cost him.

In an interview with correspondent Ross Douthat that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Trump said his crackdown “both helped and hurt” Republicans in the Nov. 3 midterms, in which the party lost control of both the House and the Senate. He gave himself “an A+ for closing up the border” and “very high marks for getting the bad ones out.”

A hotel corridor with a housekeeping cart in morning light. AI illustration / Shadow Dossier.

Then came the part few expected. “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, naming hotel workers and landscaping crews, some of them taxpayers. “I think it was too tough.”

The interview was recorded on Friday, Nov. 6, hours before Trump announced that Stephen Miller, the architect of the mass-deportation program, would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. That timing makes the remark harder to read: the president is softening his language while promoting the policy’s chief designer.

Voters line up at a small-town polling place at sunset. AI illustration / Shadow Dossier.

The political backdrop is clear. Republican support fell in South Texas and other heavily Latino areas that had swung toward the GOP in 2024, according to CBS News. In exit polling cited by CBS, 58% of voters said the administration’s immigration actions had gone too far, though Republicans still narrowly led Democrats (43% to 41%) on which party voters trust more on the issue.

What Trump did not do matters just as much. He announced no change in policy, no pause in deportations and no new exemptions. He did say he would “love to do something on immigration” with the Democrats who take over Congress in January. For now that is an opening line, not a plan, and any real change would have to pass Congress.