When President Trump suggested he was open to finding a compromise on immigration after last week’s midterms, Democratic lawmakers and conservative allies rushed to assess whether the president was truly pulling a U-turn on a policy central to his political identity.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, called for Mr. Trump to “keep your word” and work with lawmakers to pass legislation that would provide legal status to certain undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children. Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary acknowledged he was fielding calls from Democratic lawmakers interested in a deal on immigration policy. Mr. Trump’s conservative allies accused him of pursuing “amnesty” for immigrants.
Then, just as quickly, the president flipped again, shutting down the idea that he was softening his position.
“We have a very strong deportation policy; there’s no amnesty, no, no anything. We keep that,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday, adding that he had not told Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda and his new chief of staff, to make any changes to the administration’s efforts to deport millions. “My policy hasn’t changed.”
The president’s conflicting signals were the latest case in which he has indicated he is open to scaling back his hard-line policy when faced with pressure from voters or business leaders, only to revert to aggressive deportation and border policies.
Newly empowered Democratic lawmakers and even some members of Mr. Trump’s own party say the president is now botching an opportunity to do what many of his predecessors failed to achieve: forge consensus on changes to an immigration system long seen as broken.
Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, released a television ad during the midterm campaign criticizing Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown for going too far. She noted it was a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who signed a landmark immigration bill in 1986.
“You can surpass Reagan’s legacy,” she wrote on social media, “by delivering a historic immigration reform.”
Mr. Trump’s rapid zigzagging in the last week shows how much he recognizes the political cost of what has been one of the defining policies of his presidency.
During a “60 Minutes” interview taped Friday, the president suggested that immigrant workers who have lived in the United States for years — many of whom have been targeted by his own administration — should be granted some kind of protection from deportation.
“When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as — you know, 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,” Mr. Trump said. “But there’s a group of people that, I would say, on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out.”
Mr. Trump said he still wanted to deport “killers” and “drug dealers” but also “let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.”
The president’s remarks, which aired on Sunday, jolted both the left and the right.
“The takeaway from the midterms should NOT be to moderate our views on immigration,” Representative Keith Self, a Republican of Texas, wrote on social media. “Amnesty of any form would be a massive betrayal of this trust.”
Representative Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Chicago, whose mother crossed the border while pregnant with her, challenged Mr. Trump to emulate Mr. Reagan on immigration.
“If Donald Trump decides it’s been 40 years, it was a Republican who did it in 1986 and I’m going to be the Republican that does it again, then prove it, show it,” she said.
Indeed, on the very same afternoon that Mr. Trump taped his “60 Minutes” interview, he named as his chief of staff Mr. Miller, who has helped set in motion a mass deportation policy that has widely targeted immigrants without legal status in the nation.
Mr. Miller held a call with homeland security officials the morning after the election encouraging them to carry out the deportation agenda as usual, even as the president was suggesting in public he was open to making a deal with Democrats.
Mr. Trump’s aides have dismissed the idea that many voters rejected the administration’s immigration agenda, citing polling showing that immigration enforcement remains deeply important among Republicans. Public polling, however, also showed that voters trusted Democrats more on the issue, on which Mr. Trump had an advantage in 2024.
“The reality is that the Democrats’ immigration policies are massively unpopular,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement, calling that “a key reason President Trump won in a landslide in 2024.”
She noted Mr. Trump’s success in reducing border crossings and ramping up deportations. “If the Democrats want to advocate for another mass invasion of illegal immigrants into our communities, it’s political suicide for 2028,” she added.
Ms. Rogers did not respond to questions about whether Mr. Trump supports any of the various immigration proposals currently stuck in congressional gridlock, including one that would provide protection to so-called Dreamers, immigrants who came into the country illegally as children.
During an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, expressed some sympathy for such individuals, saying that “they were brought here at no fault of their own.” But he added that the administration would consider a deal providing protection to those immigrants only if “our base is with us on it.”
“They’re not with you,” responded Laura Ingraham, a Fox News anchor.
Mr. Mullin noted that Mr. Trump would not back anything that “isn’t in the right movement for this country and the Republican Party.”
Andrea Flores, an immigration analyst who worked as an adviser for the Biden and Obama administrations, said Mr. Trump had an opportunity to become ”the president who finally legalized millions of undocumented immigrants while keeping the border secure.”
She and other experts note that Mr. Trump had already successfully changed the politics of immigration. For decades, Democrats pushed Republicans to agree to provide immigration relief in exchange for investments in border security or enforcement. But after Mr. Trump attacked the Biden administration over a ballooning border crisis, many Democrats came to gradually emphasize the need for strong border security.
“Trump has fundamentally changed the politics of immigration in the United States, and Democrats have been on their back foot on this issue ever since he came to power,” Ms. Flores said. She added, “His miscalculation in pursuing a mass deportation campaign on a scale no other president has attempted has created an opening for a new immigration debate that is about more than just the border.”
It is not the first time Mr. Trump has teased his openness to an immigration deal, only to move ahead with his restrictionist agenda.
David Lapan, a former spokesman for the Homeland Security Department in Mr. Trump’s first term, recalled how the president initially pledged to help protect people brought illegally to the United States as children only to abandon a bipartisan compromise to shield them.
“He’s given us no reason to believe things that he says like that,” Mr. Lapan said. “He switches positions frequently.”
When the Dreamers bill fell apart in 2018, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, blamed the man who is now Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere,” Mr. Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Trump also helped sink a bipartisan border security bill in 2024, at the end of President Joseph R. Biden’s term, that would have also provided money for Ukraine. Mr. Trump and House Republicans were pushing for severe immigration measures that would have not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate at the time.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has at times shown his willingness to carve out exceptions to his hard-line policy, albeit temporarily.
When farmers and agriculture groups voiced alarm over the immigration crackdown last year, Mr. Trump posted on social media that immigrants in those industries were “very good, long time workers” and that he would be making changes to protect them.
The administration then issued guidance to largely pause raids at agriculture sites, meatpacking plants, restaurants and hotels — absent other criminality like human trafficking or drug smuggling. That caught some in the White House by surprise.
While agents were directed to ease enforcement at those sites, some advocates say immigration enforcement has continued on farms throughout the United States. And immigrant workers are still at risk once they leave their work sites. Just before the midterms, an uptick in ICE activity rattled agriculture communities in California, discouraging many workers from showing up at their jobs.
In January, after immigration officials fatally shot two American citizens in Minnesota, Mr. Trump said the administration could use a “softer touch.” The administration briefly scaled back its deportation strategy amid national outrage over the shootings.
Immigration arrests surged again this summer as the administration targeted people through operations at hospitals and at airports, traffic stops, courthouses and along rural construction sites and truck stops.
Mr. Miller, who convenes regular calls with homeland security officials to monitor progress on deportation goals, has in the past year encouraged them to find new ways to target and arrest people without legal status. He has also championed the removal of immigrants to third-party countries where they have no ties, a program that has resulted in many migrants being sent to countries with poor human rights conditions.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged Mr. Miller’s influence in shaping immigration policy.
“Stephen’s a very strong voice,” Mr. Trump said during an Oval Office interview with The New York Times in January. “I don’t think I disagree with him, no.”
Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
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