by Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell
President Donald Trump said he would like to work with the new Democrat majority in Congress on a plan to give some illegal immigrants legal status.
While Trump never used the word amnesty in an interview with CBS News’ Ross Douthat that aired on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” he said many illegal immigrants who are working stable jobs and paying taxes should be allowed to stay in the United States.
“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,” he said, “and there’s a large group of people think that they should be allowed to stay.”
Trump said he thinks a deal with Democrats on the issue is “something that’s actually doable.”
He reflected that his deportation crackdown “helped and hurt” Republicans in the midterms, saying that his immigration strategy may have been “too tough.”
“I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border. 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.”
Trump said there are two schools of thought on deportations.
“When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as a maid, as a cleaner, as a waitress, a lot of good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden they’re being taken out of the country, it’s a tough thing but there’s a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out,” he said.
“Then there’s also people that are more modified on that,” he continued. “In other words, get the killers out, get all the the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out, but let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.”
According to NBC News exit polls, a plurality of voters in the midterm elections favored the GOP over Democrats on the issue of immigration, 43% to 41%, with 15% saying neither party was better.
Fifty-eight percent of voters said the Trump administration had “gone too far” on immigration enforcement.
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Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell is the White House correspondent for the Daily Signal.
