President Donald Trump says his hardline immigration policy went too far and cost his party at the polls. He drew a distinction between his enforcement priorities: "I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out, but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs."

He pointed to workers such as maids, cleaners, waitresses and landscapers who were removed despite living in the country for years, saying "It's tough. It's a tough thing."

The acknowledgment is striking because Trump has never wavered publicly on immigration enforcement before, and it comes as he promoted Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the hardline policy, to replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff.

That move prompted Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to post on X that Trump's answer to the crackdown going too far "was to put the man responsible for it in charge of the White House. That's not a course correction. That's a promotion."

The interview also aired amid widespread protests against deportation operations in multiple US cities, during which, per Al Jazeera, two US citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by federal officers.

The electoral data behind the admission shows how much ground Republicans lost with Latino voters.

According to The AP Voter Poll of more than 100,000 midterm voters, cited by the New York Post, just one in three Hispanic voters said they cast their ballot for a Republican in their US House race on Tuesday, compared with roughly four in ten who voted for Trump two years earlier.

Latino voters who swung to the right in 2024 reversed course dramatically, and in large Latino-population battlegrounds like Texas Democrats won governorships and Senate seats.

Commentator Samantha Karlin told the New York Post that watching people "who look like you, your family, and your neighbors being targeted" by enforcement turned support for border security into fear and insecurity.

Even in conceding excess, Trump praised his own border record, telling "60 Minutes" he deserved "an A+ for closing up the border."

Per the New York Post, he claimed zero people came through the southern border in the last 17 months, as opposed to what he described as 25 million arrivals under previous policy, saying "Nobody ever saw anything like it."

He also stood behind removing people he called the "bad ones," framing the political damage as the byproduct of sweeping up long-settled workers alongside them.

The concession therefore narrows to scale and targeting, not direction — a distinction Democrats are unlikely to accept without oversight hearings.

He sketched the contours as deporting criminals while letting "good people" who lived, worked and paid taxes in the country stay, and suggested working "a deal" for people who have been in the US for 10 or 15 years.

He claimed people had already called him, without naming who, and said he could refrain from insulting Democrats for six months to strike a deal. Democrats, meanwhile, have said oversight of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security is a priority for the new Congress.