President Donald Trump said on Monday night that his administration’s mass deportation agenda has not put the same pressure on migrant workers as it has on people he described as murderers and drug dealers.
During a phone call with C-SPAN, Trump was asked whether law-abiding people who are paying taxes and have lived in the U.S. for a long time should be deported along with migrants who have committed serious offenses.
“We certainly haven’t put the same push on them as we have on the murderers or the drug dealers,” Trump said.
“Frankly, a big problem we had is the mental institutions being dumped into our country,” he added. “Some very dangerous people were released into our country, to put it mildly. So we have not put the same pressure, obviously. And, you know, we call them the worst of the worst. We haven’t put the same pressure on waitresses and on farm workers, etc. Not even close.”
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Trump’s comments come after he floated the idea of his administration working with Democrats on a deal for some immigrants who have lived illegally in the U.S. for more than a decade after Republicans lost majorities in both chambers of Congress in last week’s midterm elections.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday, host Ross Douthat asked Trump whether he was open to working with Democrats on immigration as he enters the lame-duck final stretch of his presidency.
“I’d love to do something on immigration,” the president replied.
When asked whether immigration enforcement hurt Republicans in the midterms, Trump said he believed it both helped and hurt, praising his administration’s border enforcement while acknowledging criticism over deportations of people with jobs.
“But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs,” Trump said.
Trump said some Americans believe immigrants who entered the country illegally should be deported, while others believe longtime workers should be allowed to remain, particularly those working in landscaping or hotels and paying taxes.
“When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s working there as a maid, as a cleaner as a this as a that, 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 tough. It’s a tough thing,” Trump said, adding that people on the far-right want deportations regardless of whether the immigrant living in the country illegally is working.
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Trump signaled in the interview his willingness to “work a deal” for people who have been in the U.S. illegally for “10 and 15 years.”
However, Trump said at a White House press briefing earlier on Monday that “there won’t be amnesty” and his policy “hasn’t changed.”
The president was asked during the phone call with C-SPAN if he expects Republicans to vote against the impeachment of Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth.
The House could take up Rep. Thomas Massie’s, R-Ky., impeachment resolution against Hegseth as early as Tuesday.
Asked what his reaction would be if some Republicans voted for Hegseth’s impeachment, Trump said he would be “disappointed.”
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Trump also said “it depends” when asked when to expect the war on Iran to end.
“Maybe we could knock it out fast or we could knock it out over a short, not a long period of time,” he said.
“Now it’s a question of I could do it quickly or not,” Trump continued. “The reason I’m doing it this way is because in speaking with Qatar, as you know, the Prime Minister was in the Oval Office today, in speaking to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, basically the neighbors who were attacked pretty violently, by the way. But in speaking to them, they’d rather do it this way rather than another hit, which would be approximately five times bigger than the first hit, which basically decimated them. So, I’d like to do it this way, too.”
Trump added that he believes Iran “would like to make a deal, and we’ll find out whether or not that’ll happen.”