Trump admits immigration enforcement may have been too ‘tough’ in first interview since midterms

By Lindsay Kornick
Published November 08, 2026
Fox News

President Donald Trump admitted that he may have been too "tough" in his immigration enforcement in his first sit-down interview since the midterm elections last week.

Trump spoke to CBS News correspondent Ross Douthat about several topics largely related to the Democratic Party's overwhelming wins in last week's midterm elections, which included victories in Republican strongholds like Texas.

During their conversation, Douthat asked whether Trump's strict immigration and deportation enforcement likely contributed to Republican losses.

"I think it both helped and hurt," Trump answered. "I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border…I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out."

In the extended interview posted online, Trump added, "We had 25 million people come in through Biden over a four-year period, and many of those people were — as you know, they were from prisons, they were drug dealers, they were from mental institutions."

However, Trump conceded that many illegal immigrants within the country were "good" people, which likely led to his policies facing backlash.

"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. Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. 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. And there's a large group of people who think that they should be allowed to stay."

"So you think your deportation policy — went too far?" Douthat asked.

"I think it was — too tough…I think it might be too tough, yeah," Trump responded, adding, "And I think ultimately that hurt me."

The president also suggested an immigration deal with the incoming Democratic Congress could be "doable" outside the more extreme groups who either prefer every illegal immigrant to be deported or prefer not to deport any illegal immigrant.

Trump also suggested many Democrats are willing to work with him to enforce the border, acknowledging incoming Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico as an example.

In a Fox News voter poll of more than 100,000 registered voters nationwide from Oct. 19 to Nov. 3, 2026, immigration was the only issue that Republicans led Democrats on.

I can't possibly agree with any of this coming from President Trump.
Barack Obama has blown away the deportation numbers compared to his.
The smartest thing he could do for the next two years is deport, deport, deport.
Every single one of them, not just the” criminal” elements.

IMO, what killed him was the affordability of the economy.
This is where the focus needs to be, along with millions of deportations.

He was deporting illegals that were also violent criminals. How do they get deported without being tough? Deporting illegals is just a part of all that could be done. Like, how after all these years do we not have enormous fines levied against anyone who employs an illegal? Why are they allowed to buy and rent property? Why are they allowed to have a drivers license?
This is where congress has really failed us. They haven’t shown an ounce of interest in getting rid of illegals.

Hakeem Jeffries, who is likely to become House speaker, compared Miller and his role in the government to a “malignant tumor” that “should be eradicated.”

Yes, seriously… I misplaced the address - sorry.

Political speech is protected, however - if that was directed at me, I would always be strapped. When someone threatens me with “eradication”, I tend to believe them.

Opinions, please!

quote:

Yes, seriously… I misplaced the address - sorry.

Here you go --- https://notthebee.com/article/...mor-to-be-eradicated

In regard to the immigration issue, the Fourth Estate caused the optics that pushed a violent, KGB, Stasi police narrative. Which turned some of the populace.

I mean how ridiculous is it, that you have taxpayers out rioting, protesting, and helping illegals and criminals evade the ICE/Police, etc..

Yet, these are the same voter morons, who complain that Pres. Trump is at fault for high gas, food prices, economy issues, etc.

I am so tired of driving around Durham, and/or going to the Planet Fitness and it is a show room of news cars (SUV, Camaros, trucks) and guess who is driving them.

The same with having 15 job sites (Civil, Industrial, Residential) within 7 miles or less of the house and only 1 or 2 Caucasians on the site.

I am sorry but you cannot tell me that it is all legit.
Especially in a sanctuary city in Durham.

(I forgot about the 4th Estate during Vietnam, but I am reading Jack Carr's latest book).

VDH:

Impeachment Buffoons and their Embarrassing Get-Hegseth Circus

As we witness the Democrats gearing up to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, we might pause to ask whether they are going to charge him with offenses that were common practice under the three prior Democratic presidents?

If Hegseth ordered strikes on suspected terrorists and drug smugglers, he and President Trump were only following the precedents of Barack Obama.

Without congressional authorization, Obama ordered about 550 targeted drone assassination strikes along the Afghan, Syrian, and Iraqi borders over his tenure.

Obama also likely had fatally droned between 2,300 and 2,500 suspected terrorists in addition to anywhere from 380 to 800 innocent civilians.

And the Obama strikes killed five U.S. citizens.

His CIA director John Brennan in 2011 deliberately lied under oath to the Congress when he stated there was no collateral damage at all during these targeted assassinations, insisting no civilians had been killed. Brennan later admitted that was an abject lie—one that the Congress excused.

Will the impeachment writs against Hegseth claim that he went to war against Iran without congressional authority?

If so, he was only following the earlier model of Bill Clinton who bombed Serbia for 78 days without congressional authority, or Barack Obama who, also without the ascent of Congress, bombed Libya for seven months.

In Clinton’s case, the bombing killed at least 500 civilians—although the Serbian government estimated that between 1,200 and 2,000 citizens died by American bombing. Among the collateral damage was the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Note further that most estimates put Obama’s civilian fatality rate during his Libyan bombing at between 200 and 400 deaths.

Also recall that Bill Clinton eventually hit dual-use targets that included the power grid of Belgrade, oil refineries, civilian airports, and many of the bridges on the Danube. The Obama Libyan bombing targeted civilian airports, ports and dock works, and communications centers.

So far in Iran, the Trump-Hegseth bombing has largely avoided dual-use targets such as the television stations, civilian airports, and power stations. And to the degree civilians were killed in Iran, it was largely due to the Iranian government's deliberate strategy of placing military targets and command and control centers next to schools, hospitals, and mosques - in the fashion that was routinely adopted by Hamas in the Gazan war.

Democrats claim they will additionally impeach Hegseth for firing top generals without sufficient cause.

Will they again follow the Clinton-Obama examples?

Clinton, remember, fired Gen. Harold Campbell, for speaking disrespectfully about Clinton—for saying things about Clinton at a private banquet of officers that paled in comparison to the public invective directed at Trump by retired generals and admirals during his first term.

But Obama may have set the record for firing the most and highest-ranking generals, many seemingly without good cause.

Gen Stanley McChrystal was in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan at a very critical juncture in 2010. But when a private conversation was leaked to Rolling Stone quoting McChrystal making a disparaging remark about the Obama administration, he was summarily recalled and fired.

Most infamously, Obama fired Gen. James Mattis who was leading CentCom in 2013 because he was felt to be too bellicose or did not reflect the Obama Iranian policy, which was largely one of appeasement.

And do we remember how Obama not only fired Gen. Michael Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but later used the FBI and the DOJ to entrap him, which eventually led to his firing from his Trump-appointed National Security Advisor billet.

There is talk that the impeachment writs will include charges that Hegseth “illegally” waged war against Yemen.

But again, if so, Hegseth was a piker compared to prior administrations. Review the vast number of countries that Clinton, Obama, and Biden during their administrations bombed without congressional authority or much of any explanation at all to the American people. Their targeted nations list included Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, the former Yugoslavia, and Yemen.

Perhaps most laughable will be the impeachment writ that Hegseth used an unsecure platform for communications, a lapse that did not lead to any known compromised personnel or information given to foreign interests. In contrast, do we remember the Robert Hanssen spy case when for years an FBI agent walked off with thousands of Pentagon top-secret dossiers and files and sold them to the Russians?

Even worse was the 1999 Dr. Wen Ho Lee breach at Los Alamos when the Pentagon had to completely overhaul its security methodology, given Lee’s theft of classified design details for U.S. nuclear warheads.

One could argue that the Obama administration allowed more egregious leakage of military classified information than any presidency in history. Have the current impeachment zealots forgotten the Edward Snowden leaks of 2013, when he targeted both NSA and Pentagon digital infrastructure, creating existential risks for U.S. surveillance operations abroad and harming our allies?

Nor should we forget the 2013 Chelsea Manning WikiLeaks disaster. He/she downloaded more than 700,000 classified military logs and diplomatic cables, and completely compromised and embarrassed the Obama Pentagon.

Nor should we omit the Jack Teixeira leaks during the Pentagon tenure of Secretary Lloyd Austin in the Biden administration. Teixeira photographed top-secret Pentagon intelligence briefings and posted them on a chat server. He gave away classified Pentagon assessments of almost everything known to be going on at that time in Ukraine.

No one, of course, blamed Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for such an egregious leak, or his secretive two-weeks AWOL from Pentagon.

Do we remember all of the melodramas, psychodramas, and scandals of defense secretaries themselves during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations? In 1996, during the tenure of Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Perry, the White House dumped Monica Lewinsky into a public affairs job at the Pentagon, as part of an stealthy attempt to keep her out of sight and sound.

Maybe we should consider lifting the statute of limitations to retroactively impeach or indict the Obama secretaries of defense in 2013, Hagel and Panetta. Their tenures coincided with the greatest corruption bribery and fraud case in US naval history conducted by so-called “Fat Leonard”. He was a notorious defense contractor who bribed all sorts of top Navy officials with travel, cash, and, yes, prostitutes and he bilked the Pentagon out of at least $35 million.

An internal Pentagon study was buried that might have saved $125 billion in sheer administrative waste and under Panetta.

Do we remember the Obama training and equipment disaster, in which secretary Panetta’s Pentagon program spent $500 million and yet produced only four or five active Syrian fighters on the battlefield.

During the tenure of Secretary Lloyd Austin, the DoD completely failed to conduct a mandatory financial audit every single year of Austin's tenure.

In sum, if we applied the delusional standards of the current McCarthyite impeachers to past Pentagon officials, then there would have been dozens of Democratic appointees impeached—and convicted.

As for Hegseth’s own record, in a single year he had corrected Lloyd Austin’s chronic military recruitment shortfalls.
The removal of the thuggish dictator Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, and the June 2025 one-off strike on the Iranian nuclear sites went flawlessly without a single fatality.

As for the Iran War, compared to prior misadventures in the Middle East, so far the United States has lost far fewer fatalities (23) than the daily rate accident on the military outside the Iranian war theater. And despite the unfortunate April halt in finishing the job that led to six months of inconsequential talk, and spiraling gas prices, Hegseth had logically objected to the on-off again negotiations that only encouraged Iranian haggling that dragged the conflict into the midterms.

As far as cost, the Iran war may exceed $50 billion, but perhaps still less than the total damage in dollars that Joe Biden committed in the catastrophic 2021 scramble from Kabul. His Pentagon left behind billions of dollars’ worth of military bases, a new embassy, infrastructure, vehicles, equipment, and the latest military hardware—much of which the Taliban put up for sale on the international terrorist Mart.

In short, if the next two years follow this anticipated impeachment circus, then Donald Trump will probably leave office in January 2029 with his highest popularity ratings of his entire presidency.

Assholes...... But, it needs to be done, still, this should have been done months ago....

https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2119936778173903189

quote:

Originally posted by downtownv:
Barack Obama has blown away the deportation numbers compared to his.

That’s because HE LIED! (Big surprise)
Anyone who showed up at the border and they said, “Not a chance, go home” was counted as a ”deportation”.
He didn’t actually go out and round up illegals, they just got turned away and that is how the numbers got padded.

quote:

President Donald Trump admitted that he may have been too "tough" in his immigration enforcement in his first sit-down interview since the midterm elections last week.

Too "tough"?
We have 40-60 million illegal aliens to deport... and we've deported maybe 1 million, max?

I voted for the guy who said he was going to deport people like this:

Terror In The Skies: Twice Deported Illegal Alien Attempts To Storm Cockpit Of United Airlines Flight

A twice-deported Honduran illegal alien claimed to have a bomb and attempted to storm the cockpit of a Newark-to-New Orleans United flight on Monday night.

Fox News' Bill Melugin reports that New Orleans-bound United Flight 2174, carrying 46 passengers and six crew members, departed from Newark International Airport. Midflight, the pilots radioed air traffic control to report an attempted cockpit breach, triggering a "Level 4" threat alert.

Melugin said Flight 2174 landed at MSY (New Orleans airport), where the deranged illegal alien was arrested and charged with felony bomb threat, terroristic threats, and disorderly conduct.

A separate report from the New York Post revealed air traffic control audio describing the illegal alien as a Hispanic man who "spoke nearly no English." The audio also revealed that the man changed into all-black clothing before attempting to storm the cockpit.

"Per DHS - Gomez-Alberto crossed the Texas border illegally in 2011 and was deported, then illegally re-entered through the New Mexico border in 2014 and was deported a second time. He illegally re-entered the country a third time in 2019, was arrested by Border Patrol, but was released from custody after an immigration judge ordered his release," Melugin said.

The attempted cockpit breach raises an alarming national security question: How did a twice-deported illegal alien remain in the country and board a commercial flight, and how did immigration officials or aviation security personnel miss this flight risk?

Additional questions:

Were any Federal Air Marshals aboard Flight 2174?
How many air marshals were flying missions nationwide that night? How many supervisors were flying?
What did DHS know about the suspect before he boarded?
Did passenger vetting flag him?

Perhaps the federal government should put twice-deported illegals on TSA's 'No Fly List' ...

https://www.zerohedge.com/poli...ited-airlines-flight

I'm not going to win any popularity contests with this, but so be it. I don't think "they do it too" is a defense. We should be better than them. While the conclusions in the article are opinions, the facts in the article can't be disputed. I'm hopeful that Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis is the 2028 nominee.

https://www.washingtonexaminer...G3DjS2wMj5wWfVmTXwel

For the first time in 20 years, corruption was the top issue on voters’ minds this election year. President Donald Trump rightly deserves blame for making it a top-tier issue.

The day before Republicans suffered historic losses in the House and Senate, turning both chambers over to the Democrats, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) told radio host Stephen A. Smith that “the swamp is the worst it has ever been” before lamenting “the amount of money these people are making who are in the administration.”

DeSantis then attacked Trump aide Alina Habba, saying she was “working for DOJ, and she gets a $10-million-a-year contract, and then the guy that gave it to her got a presidential pardon somehow.”

DeSantis is right, and the Trump administration’s corruption goes far deeper than that.

The financial conflicts began before Trump returned to office. Four days before his inauguration, representatives of an Emirati royal secretly agreed to purchase a $500 million stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial venture. His administration subsequently agreed to expand the United Arab Emirates’s access to advanced American artificial intelligence chips. A Chinese-born businessman who later invested at least $75 million in World Liberty and became an adviser to the venture then saw the Securities and Exchange Commission suspend its fraud case against him in February 2025.

That April, Trump’s own investment accounts made 327 stock purchases the day before his tariff reversal triggered a historic rally. Unidentified traders placed extraordinarily well-timed bets just before the tariff pause, including options worth approximately $2.14 million that subsequently reached $21.44 million.

In May, Vietnam approved a $1.5 billion Trump-branded resort while negotiating to avoid his threatened tariffs. Its prime minister publicly credited Eric Trump’s visit with motivating officials to expedite the project. That month, the administration accepted a luxury aircraft from Qatar, with plans for its eventual transfer to Trump’s presidential library foundation, and Trump hosted leading buyers of his meme coin at his private golf club, tying presidential access to purchases of a product benefiting his business.

In July, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million toward his presidential library while awaiting his administration’s approval of its merger with Skydance. The merger was approved later that month. By this summer, Trump’s media company had found another way to profit from presidential power: selling Wall Street faster access to his Truth Social posts. The service charges as much as $100,000 a month for a speed advantage in receiving statements that can send markets soaring or plunging. Trump is the sole beneficiary of the trust holding 41% of the company. The president makes market-moving government announcements on his own platform, and his business collects money from financial firms seeking to trade on those announcements before ordinary investors can react.

Voters elected Trump to make their lives more affordable. Instead, they have watched their bills rise while the president finds new ways to profit from the power they entrusted to him. When the same policies that strain their household budgets create opportunities for his enrichment, their anger is hardly surprising. Voters expected Trump to improve their finances. They have every reason to resent seeing him prioritize his own.
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TRUMP’S HUBRIS AND FAILURE GET THEIR VOTER PAYBACK

According to the exit polls, corruption was a “crucial or a major factor” for 90% of voters, beating the cost of living (89%), Iran (74%), and data centers (56%). Those who named corruption as a crucial factor in their vote voted hard against Trump, 63%-35%.

Republicans cannot credibly campaign against Washington corruption while excusing it when a president of their own party benefits. They should ban congressional stock trading, work with Democrats to investigate the administration’s financial conflicts, and make sure government decisions serve the public. If Republicans want voters to trust them with power, they must demonstrate that they can hold their own side accountable.

The voters were outraged over corruption? Really? Where was the outrage over the massive fraud and corruption within USAID? What about billions lost in Medicare and Medicaid fraud? Somalian fraud in Minnesota? And what does all of this fraud have in common? Democrats, neck deep in all of it. Corruption is basically a Democrat party platform now.
But everyone clutches their pearls at the thought of orange man’s corruption? Please, spare me. When people demand the end of Democrat fraud, maybe I’ll listen, but not likely.

quote:

Originally posted by Fed161: While the conclusions in the article are opinions, the facts in the article can't be disputed.

quote:

Originally posted by Fed161:
Voters elected Trump to make their lives more affordable. Instead, they have watched their bills rise while the president finds new ways to profit from the power they entrusted to him.

quote:

That April, Trump’s own investment accounts made 327 stock purchases the day before his tariff reversal triggered a historic rally.

I’m not an expert on this matter, but I’d guess President Trump’s investments are being managed with no communication from him. Of course, the leftists will claim otherwise.