Less than a week after the astonishing blue wave, the reckoning continues for Republicans trying to understand the reasons behind this humiliating defeat. After blaming the war with Iran, President Trump has added another factor he believes is responsible for the Republican defeat in the midterm elections.
In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Nov. 8, the president said the campaign had swept up people who held good jobs and whose only violation was having entered the country illegally. He said he would be willing to work with Democrats to reach a solution on immigration, though he offered no specifics on what such a deal would involve.
Trump said his deportation campaign had been “too tough” and cost Republicans some midterm voters, and he again signaled openness to a deal with Democrats that could include a legal pathway for certain immigrants — a shift in tone with direct bearing on Haitian and other communities that have absorbed the brunt of his enforcement drive.
“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, according to POLITICO’s account of the interview.
Pressed on what an agreement with Democrats might look like, the president pointed to immigrants who are working and paying taxes as a possible starting point, while stopping short of any specifics.
“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, right? And in some cases, paying taxes,” he said. He described the removal of long-settled workers in vivid terms: “When you go into a hotel, and you say, ‘Let me see your pass,’ and you have a woman that’s worked there as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress … and all of a sudden, they’re being taken outta the country, it’s tough.” Trump said he believed Democrats would be interested in a deal and claimed some had already called him, but would not say who.
The context around those words is what gives them weight.
POLITICO reported that the comments are likely to deepen frustration among immigration hard-liners, and that they land just days after Trump elevated Stephen Miller — the architect of the administration’s aggressive immigration policy — to White House chief of staff. Many Republicans, POLITICO noted, blamed the party’s midterm losses on Miller and on the enforcement agenda he has driven.
For Haitian communities, the president’s softer language collides with a hard fact already on the books: the protection that shielded them is gone. Temporary Protected Status for Haiti ended effective July 27, 2026, after the Supreme Court cleared the way in June in Mullin v. Doe, stripping legal status from hundreds of thousands of people who had lived and worked in the United States for years. The “legal pathway” Trump floated for working, tax-paying immigrants would, if it ever materialized, describe many of those same Haitians — but the president named no bill, no timeline, and no mechanism, and the official he just placed at the center of the White House built the policy that removed their protection in the first place.
The enforcement itself has not paused. Haitians and other immigrant families across the country continue to be caught up in it, from workers detained on their way to drop children at school to the recent case of an 8-year-old Haitian boy in San Diego taken into federal custody after an immigration check-in.
What the interview does confirm is a widening split inside the president’s own party over how far the deportation campaign should go — one side pressing to remove everyone without status, the other, as Trump described it, believing that some immigrants who are working and contributing should be allowed to stay.
https://ctninfo.com/trump-admits-dep…l-with-democrats/
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