US President Donald Trump has said his immigration crackdown was “too tough”, marking one of his clearest public retreats from a defining plank of his political agenda, following his party’s drubbing in the midterm elections.
In an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes programme, Trump said he believed he deserved an “A plus” for drastically limiting illegal border crossings, but he had been politically “hurt” by sweeping deportations.
His acknowledgement came despite his homeland security department insisting it was not backing away from the crackdown.
Election day polling indicated immigration was the third most important issue for midterm voters, after the economy and the state of democracy.
In historically conservative states like Texas, a swing of Latino voters towards Democrats helped seal the Democratic Party’s landslide majorities in Congress.
The president told 60 Minutes that immigration “both helped and hurt” his fellow Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms.
“I think I got an A plus for closing up the border,” he said in the programme that aired on Sunday evening.
He added: “For getting people out, I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.
“But 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.”
“I think it was too tough,” the president said.
Trump also said he’d “love to do something on immigration” with congressional Democrats, without offering details.
In a previous interview with 60 Minutes a year ago, a defiant Trump insisted his administraiton’s immigration raids “haven’t gone far enough”.
His conciliatory words on Sunday were an abrupt change in tone from a White House statement earlier in the day to the BBC.