Trump admits immigration crackdown was 'too tough'

US President Donald Trump has said his immigration crackdown was 'too tough'. He made the remark after his party's heavy defeat in the midterm elections.

With it, he signalled a public retreat from one of the central positions of his political programme.

In an interview on CBS's '60 Minutes', Trump said he would give himself an 'A+' for sharply limiting illegal border crossings, but that he had been politically 'hurt' by the mass deportation of immigrants.

Trump said, 'I think I got an A-plus for closing the border.' He added, 'For getting people out, especially getting bad people out, I'd get a very good grade.'

'But I suffer, because we took people that had good jobs, that violated one law, and that was they came into the country illegally,' Trump said. 'I think it was very tough.'

Despite Trump's admission, the US Department of Homeland Security said it is not backing away from its anti-immigration operations. A spokesperson for the department said, 'ICE is not backing off or slowing down.'

An exit poll conducted on election day showed that immigration was the third most important issue for voters, after the economy and the state of democracy.

In historically Republican strongholds such as Texas, a section of Latino voters shifted towards the Democrats. That contributed to the Democratic Party winning a large majority in Congress.

Trump told '60 Minutes' that in Tuesday's midterm elections the immigration issue had 'helped and hurt' his Republican Party's candidates.

Trump also said he is interested in doing something on immigration with the Democrats in Congress, though he gave no details on the matter.

A year ago, in an interview with '60 Minutes', Trump had insisted that his administration's immigration operation was 'not enough'. His conciliatory remark on Sunday was a sudden change of tone from the White House statement given to the BBC earlier in the day.

After the election defeat, Vice-President J D Vance showed a positive attitude towards changing their immigration enforcement strategy. In a long post online, he wrote that he was open to the idea that their law enforcement strategy should change, for example by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal workers.

On Friday, however, Trump announced the appointment of Stephen Miller, known for his hardline stance on immigration policy, as White House chief of staff. That gave no indication of a retreat from the administration's position. Miller is widely considered one of the main architects of the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy in its first and second terms.

Sources in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told CBS that in recent weeks officers have been instructed to target the arrest of around 2,700 undocumented immigrants a day. Earlier the target was 2,000 arrests a day.

This year, the extensive immigration enforcement drive has sparked protests against ICE in cities including Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. In Minneapolis, two US protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by gunfire from immigration officers.

The reality of the Democrats' victory in the midterm elections will take hold in January. California Congressman Robert Garcia will soon lead a powerful oversight committee in the House of Representatives. On Tuesday he gave a list of possible targets — Trump's family, corporate corruption, allegations of abuse of power against the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, and the government's handling of the Epstein files. The Democrats impeached Trump twice in his first term, though the Senate ultimately voted to acquit him in both cases.