After midterm elections, Trump said he was ‘too tough’ on immigration. Here’s what he’s done so far
PolitiFact ·
In his first sit-down interview after the midterm elections where his party resoundingly lost control of both chambers of Congress, President Donald Trump both acknowledged that his immigration agenda might have turned away some voters and praised it.
CBS News’ “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat asked Trump if his immigration crackdown hurt Republicans in the elections.
“I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump said in the interview that aired Nov. 8. “I think I got an A+ for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” But the administration also removed “people that had good jobs” in landscaping or hotels, in some cases people who paid taxes, he said, and that hurt the party.
Trump, who said he had been “too tough” on immigration, said he would work out an immigration “deal” with Democrats, but provided no details.
After the Nov. 3 election, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin floated the idea of working with Congress on a legal pathway for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children and who are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
On Nov. 9, Trump told reporters “we’re not going to have amnesty or anything” for immigrants illegally in the country.
Trump has promoted Stephen Miller, his former deputy chief of staff, as his new chief of staff. Miller led Trump’s first-term hard-line immigration agenda, supporting policies that separated families arriving at the border and that banned the entry of people from several Muslim-majority countries.
During Trump’s second term, Miller has been a leading architect of Trump’s immigration strategy and has pushed the administration to arrest at least 3,000 immigrants a day.
Immigration experts doubt that Trump will cool down on enforcement as Miller embraces his new role.
“Promoting Stephen Miller hardly signals a retreat from the administration’s mass deportation agenda,” said Tom K. Wong, director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego. “ Until we see actual changes in enforcement priorities, the president’s remarks seem more like a change in political messaging than a change in policy.”
PolitiFact has tracked Trump’s progress on immigration campaign promises on our MAGA-Meter . Here’s a look at where Trump’s immigration promises stand.
Haitians deported from the United States deplane at the international airport in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, Aug. 27, 2026. (AP)
This is In the Works.
The Department of Homeland Security said that as of October, the administration had deported about 1.2 million immigrants during Trump’s second term. Immigration experts say it’s hard to independently verify the scale of deportations, because the administration isn’t releasing monthly or comprehensive data.
The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, analyzed DHS data and estimated that from January 2025 to July 31, the administration deported about 980,000 people. The institute said that on an annual basis, while the total deportations are up from the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remain below the levels from the early 2000s.
The Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley, obtained data from ICE showing the agency arrested and detained about 42,000 people in July, a monthly record during this term.
A substantial proportion of those arrested within the country are people who lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, said Elizabeth Cohen, a Boston University political science professor.
“ Trump‘s immigration agenda has dramatically expanded an already costly interior enforcement apparatus,” Cohen said, although most deportations continue to originate at the border, and border encounters have fallen sharply from Biden administration levels.
A U.S. Border Patrol truck drives past a section of border wall, Sept. 17, 2026, in Mission, Texas. (AP)
This is In the Works.
DHS reported Nov. 3 that from the beginning of Trump’s second term in late January 2025 through Oct. 30, U.S. Customs and Border Protection completed approximately 330 miles of new border barriers. This includes 139.5 miles of primary wall that faces Mexico, 73.9 miles of waterborne barrier , which are usually floating infrastructure placed in bodies of water along the southern border; and 116.2 miles of secondary wall, barriers behind the already existing primary walls to add an additional obstacle.
On Nov. 9, the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration can continue with border wall construction along the southern border in the Big Bend region of Southwest Texas, which environmentalists say could harm wildlife and the area’s residents. It lifted a district judge’s order from October that halted construction.
Since Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, which included funding to build the border wall, CBP has awarded 11 contracts to build segments of new wall and detection technology.
CBP says the money awarded in part is for building a “smart wall,” which is a mixture of steel walls, roads, detection technology, cameras and lighting.
CBP has designated $34.6 billion of the law’s funding for the border wall.
This is In the Works.
In a 6-3 vote in June, the Supreme Court paved the way for the administration to revoke Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status designation, which protected hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation.
In recent months, about 1,000 of the 350,000 people with TPS have been deported to Haiti, according to Human Rights Watch, which cited Haiti’s National Migration Office. Haitians were also deported to Mexico in 2025 and 2026.
Trump made this promise in 2024 as he and his running mate JD Vance spread the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pets.
This is a Promise Kept.
During his first term, Trump used executive orders to impose travel bans on people from seven countries, suspending their visas for 90 days. After a legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled that the president can issue a travel ban under certain circumstances.
President Joe Biden revoked the ban; Trump resurrected it in his second term and expanded it to 19 countries.
This is a Promise Broken.
Biden in 2021 terminated Trump’s first-term Migrant Protection Protocol, aka Remain in Mexico program. In January 2025, at the start of his second term, Trump signed an executive order to reinstate the program , which sent certain migrants seeking asylum to Mexico to await their U.S. immigration court proceedings.
On Oct. 7, a federal court ruled the program’s implementation is unlawful. The Trump administration has not appealed this decision.
This is a Promise Broken.
Trump lobbied for the passage of the SAVE America Act . The legislation would require people to provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when registering to vote. It passed the House in February but stalled in the Senate. It’s unlikely that the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress will pass this legislation.
Federal law already says only U.S. citizens can vote in elections for Congress and president. When applying to register to vote, people sign a form attesting that they are U.S. citizens.
RELATED : All of our fact-checks about immigration
PolitiFact Staff Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.