Immigration News: Arrests Go On After Midterm Losses
The latest immigration news from Washington is a contradiction. President Donald Trump has said his administration’s deportation crackdown may have been “too tough” and suggested it was time to sit down with Democrats on immigration. But on the ground, nothing has changed. Immigration arrests have gone on unabated since the midterm elections, with officers detaining people from California to Massachusetts, and the Department of Homeland Security says enforcement will not slow down. The gap between the president’s words and his administration’s actions has become the central question of the immigration debate after the Republican Party’s midterm defeat.
Trump made the admission in an interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes, recorded on Friday and broadcast on Sunday, November 8. Asked whether his deportation policy had gone too far, he said, “I think it might be too tough, yeah.” The comments followed significant Republican losses in the November 3 midterm elections, in which Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress and made gains in traditionally Republican areas, including parts of Texas.
But the agencies carrying out the crackdown have received no instructions to change course. Multiple United States officials told CBS News that the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had received no orders to reduce enforcement following the elections. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote in an online post the day after the election that “Deportations will continue,” warning that ICE takes no days off, “and that this includes on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Election Day.” Hours after the 60 Minutes interview, Trump named Stephen Miller, the architect of his hardline immigration agenda, as his new chief of staff.
Trump’s ‘Too Tough’ Admission on 60 Minutes
The interview was the president’s most candid acknowledgement yet that his immigration policy may have cost his party at the ballot box. Speaking to CBS correspondent Ross Douthat, Trump conceded that the crackdown had affected undocumented immigrants who had established jobs and lives in the United States, while maintaining that his administration had won support for securing the border and removing people with criminal records. He said the crackdown had both helped and hurt his party, and that Americans were divided over whether people with established jobs and otherwise law-abiding lives should be allowed to remain.
Trump also opened the door, at least in words, to a deal with the Democrats who will control the next Congress. “I’d love to do something on immigration,” he said in the interview, suggesting it was time to sit down with the rival party. He had struck a similar note on election night, telling Fox News as results showed Democrats overtaking control of both the House and Senate, “I mean, we can work with them on immigration, I think. Immigration is a big deal. I’ve always felt we should be able to work on immigration.”
But the president’s own next move undercut the message. Hours after the interview, he named Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff. Miller is the architect of the hardline immigration agenda, the official most closely associated with the mass deportation campaign, and his promotion to the most powerful staff job in the White House was read across Washington as a sign that the president intends to stay the course.
The Midterm Verdict on the Crackdown
The election results that prompted Trump’s admission were a rout for the Republicans. Democrats trounced the GOP on November 3, winning control of both chambers of Congress and making gains in areas that had long been Republican strongholds, including parts of Texas. Exit polling by CBS News found that 58 per cent of voters nationwide believed the Trump administration’s immigration actions had gone too far, a striking figure for a policy that had been the president’s signature issue.
The polling had been pointing in that direction for months. A Fox News poll released in the lead-up to the election found that 53 per cent of registered voters felt the immigration crackdown had “gone too far,” and 60 per cent of independent voters agreed. Among Hispanic voters, the shift was even sharper. A Pew survey found that support for the president among the Hispanic voters who backed him in 2024 had fallen from a high of 93 per cent at the start of 2025 to a low of 57 per cent. Two-thirds of Hispanic participants in the Fox poll said the campaign had overreached, and some Republicans running in the midterm election, including Representative Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, had openly criticised the president’s hardline policies.
The Latino vote was decisive in the outcome. A record 14.5 million Latinos voted in the November 3 election, and two out of three cast ballots for Democrats in House races, according to a survey by UnidosUS, a civil rights and advocacy group. The organisation said the results sent a clear message: voters had rejected what it called the administration’s “out-of-control mass deportation campaign and the abusive, violent, cruel tactics personified by ICE.”
Arrests Go On Unabated
Despite the election result and the president’s own doubts, the enforcement machine has not paused. In Los Angeles, masked immigration officers in body armour blocked a hospital emergency room driveway in a heavily Latino neighbourhood early on Saturday. In central Alabama, twin 19-year-old brothers from Venezuela were arrested while driving back to college a day after the election. Advocates reported arrests from California to Michigan to Massachusetts in the days after the vote.
In Florida, the pace has been relentless. Florida Highway Patrol officers and ICE agents have detained people in their cars and in public places, including supermarkets, pharmacies and gas stations, and immigrants under supervision have been arrested when they showed up at ICE’s Miami office for their appointments. Maria Bilbao, a campaign coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee in Miami, said she has received at least one call a day from someone detained in South Florida since the election. “Everything remains exactly the same. The arrests have not ceased at all,” Bilbao said.
The Department of Homeland Security has pushed back on some of the criticism. In a statement, the department said, “ICE does not target hospitals, schools, or churches,” a response to the reports of officers blocking a hospital driveway in Los Angeles. On Sunday, the department said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not be “backing away or slowing down,” a message that was repeated by the White House. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis told CBS News that the administration would not slow its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants it described as criminals.
The 19,000-a-Week Target
The scale of the enforcement campaign is set by a target that has not changed since before the election. According to agency sources cited by CBS News, ICE officials had been instructed in recent weeks to aim for approximately 19,000 arrests weekly, or about 2,700 a day, compared with an earlier target of 2,000 daily arrests. The higher target was established before the November 3 elections, and officials at the Department of Homeland Security and ICE had received no instructions to scale it back after the vote. The target is the clearest evidence that the administration’s enforcement goals are unchanged: the president may have said the policy might be too tough, but the number his agencies are told to hit has not moved.
The arrest figures show how far the campaign has already gone. In September, ICE announced it had tallied two consecutive months with more than 50,000 immigration arrests, beating a record set in June, when 43,900 people were detained. The White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, has been blunt about the direction of travel, saying in an interview in July, “We need more. We need more arrests, and we need more deportations.”
But the figures also show who is being detained, and that is where the debate over the crackdown is sharpest. The Department of Homeland Security has argued that approximately 70 per cent of its immigration detainees are criminals, if pending charges are factored in. According to the Deportation Data Project, which analyses government data sets, some 70 per cent of those held in ICE detention have no criminal record. The gap between those two figures is the gap between the administration’s account of its enforcement — that it targets “the worst of the worst” — and the account of advocates and researchers, who say the dragnet has swept up people with jobs, families and no criminal history.
Miller’s Promotion and the Administration’s Message
The appointment of Stephen Miller as chief of staff is the clearest signal of the administration’s intentions. Miller has been the driving force behind the immigration crackdown since the start of the second Trump administration, and his elevation to the White House’s top staff job puts him at the centre of every decision the president makes. The timing of the announcement, hours after the president told 60 Minutes that the crackdown might be too tough, was read as a deliberate message: whatever doubts the president expressed on television, the policy will be run by the man who designed it.
The rest of the administration has echoed that message. Secretary Mullin’s post-election statement that “Deportations will continue” was unambiguous, and the department’s insistence that ICE would not be “backing away or slowing down” left no room for doubt. The White House, through spokeswoman Lauren Bis, said the administration would not slow its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants it described as criminals. That unity matters because it shapes what happens next. If the president had wanted to slow the enforcement campaign, the signal would have gone to the Department of Homeland Security and to ICE. Instead, the signal that went out was the opposite: the target of 19,000 arrests a week stands, the secretary says deportations will continue through the holidays, and the architect of the crackdown is now the chief of staff.
What Happens Next
The question now is whether the president’s words on 60 Minutes lead anywhere. Trump has said he would like to do something on immigration with the Democrats, and a deal is not impossible: he has previously said he is open to a path to legalisation for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants, and Democrats in the new Congress will be under pressure to deliver one. But any deal would have to bridge a wide gap. Trump would likely demand that any agreement contain restrictions on legal immigration, such as caps on green cards, that Democrats may not want to accept.
Democrats in the new Congress are expected to use their majorities to confront the enforcement campaign directly. They will be under pressure from voters and advocates to try to defund or abolish ICE, to rein in the agency’s aggressive tactics, and to investigate the companies making billions from immigration enforcement, detention and deportation contracts, as well as the political ties behind them. The midterm result gives them a mandate for that confrontation, and the Latino vote that delivered their majorities will expect them to act on it.
For now, the arrests continue, the target stands at 19,000 a week, and the man who built the crackdown is the president’s chief of staff. The latest immigration news is that the president said his policy might be too tough, and then did nothing to make it softer.
*Source: ABC News*