Six days after voters gave Democrats control of Congress, President Donald Trump said the thing his administration spent two years refusing to say. His deportation policy, he told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview recorded Friday and aired Sunday night, was “too tough.”
“I think it was too tough. I think it might be too tough, yeh,” Trump said. “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.” Of the midterm result, he said: “I think, ultimately, that hurt me.” He also said a deal with Democrats on a “different pathway” for long-settled workers could be “achievable.”
For Black immigrants, the admission arrives after the damage. Black immigrants from Haiti, Africa and the rest of the Caribbean have been hit in specific, documented ways. Temporary Protected Status for Haiti ended in late July. By mid-September, Democracy Now reported, there had been at least four deportation flights to Haiti, and the Ohio Immigrant Alliance counted a 142% jump in detentions of Haitians at four immigration jails in Ohio since protected status ended. The group also documented ICE arresting people at their check-in appointments and near schools and apartment buildings.
Those are the workers Trump now says he regrets taking. People who lost protected status lost their legal footing to stay, and the arrests have fallen on Haitian families who were here lawfully until July.
Trump’s words are a political reading, not a policy change. He still says he deserves “an A+” on the border and “very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” Nothing he said on the program ended a flight, closed a detention site or restored a single work permit. Days earlier he made Stephen Miller, the architect of the mass deportation program, his chief of staff.
Democrats, who take the House in January, now hold the leverage. House Homeland Security Committee chair-in-waiting Bennie Thompson has already said he wants Miller under oath about ICE shootings. A deal Trump offers because the polls turned is a deal that can be taken back when they turn again.
Black immigrants should not be the afterthought of whatever Democrats negotiate. Any bargain that protects “good workers” in landscaping and hotels while leaving out the Haitians who lost status by presidential order would repeat the original harm. Democrats should write restored Haitian status into the first draft, and make Trump sign it before the first new flight leaves.
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