President Donald Trump acknowledged that his administration’s immigration enforcement policies may have been overly aggressive and expressed a willingness to pursue immigration reform with Democrats following their sweeping victories in the 2026 midterm elections.
His remarks drew a positive response from an Evangelical refugee advocacy organization.
During an appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Trump discussed the Republican Party’s significant electoral losses, which gave Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. Asked whether he could identify an issue on which he would cooperate with Democratic lawmakers, Trump pointed to immigration.
The president said he would “love to do something on immigration,” suggesting that some immigrants who have established lives and careers in the United States should be permitted to remain.
“There’s a large part of the country that [thinks] 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,” Trump said.
When interviewer Ross Douthat questioned whether his administration’s deportation efforts had “went too far,” Trump answered affirmatively.
“I think it might be too tough,” he said.
Trump nevertheless defended his administration’s border enforcement record, contrasting it with immigration levels under former President Joe Biden.
“I think I got an A+ for closing up the border because we had 25 million people come in through Biden over a 4-year period, and many of those people were, as you know, they were from prisons, they were drug dealers, they were from mental institutions, they were from all over the world, not just South America,” Trump said.
He also emphasized his administration’s success in removing criminal immigrants, saying “zero people came in through our southern border as opposed to 25 million people” and “I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” However, he acknowledged the consequences for employed immigrants, adding, “I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs.”
Trump indicated that he would consider arrangements allowing undocumented immigrants who have spent many years in the country working in occupations such as landscaping and housekeeping to stay. He also suggested that Democrats were receptive to negotiations, saying, “People have already called.”
World Relief, an Evangelical Christian organization involved in refugee resettlement, welcomed the president’s remarks in a statement issued Monday.
“We agree with President Trump that the deportation efforts of the past two years have gone too far,” said Myal Greene, the organization’s president and CEO. “They have impacted many individuals who were lawfully present when the president took office and have left many U.S. citizen children and spouses as functional orphans and widows.”
“We welcome the president’s comments and urge him and congressional leaders, in both parties, to work together in good faith to forge consensus policy reforms that could actually become law — as soon as possible, before more families are harmed,” Greene added.
Matthew Soerens, World Relief’s vice president for advocacy and policy, linked the Republican Party’s election losses to voter dissatisfaction with the administration’s approach to immigration.
Pointing to “the dramatic shift in the Latino vote in last week’s midterm elections and the evidence that many Evangelical voters sat the elections out,” Soerens said the results demonstrated “the political unpopularity of family-separating mass deportation policies.”
“There are serious, bipartisan proposals that avoid the extremes of either mass deportation or amnesty,” Soerens said.
“I hope and pray the president will pursue them,” he continued. “We would be thrilled for President Trump to sign long-overdue legislation that Presidents Bush, Obama and Biden all tried but failed to do.”
