Trump Floats Immigration Deal Two Years After Texans Voted for Mass Deportation

In 2024, Donald Trump asked for Texas’s vote on a promise to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” as he put it in accepting the Republican nomination. Texans gave it to him. On Sunday, two years later and five days after his party lost Congress, he told CBS’s 60 Minutes that his deportation policy “might be too tough” and that he wants a deal for immigrants who have lived in the United States for years, in some cases 10 or 15.

“Get the killers out,” Trump told Ross Douthat, according to the network’s transcript. He listed “the rough ones” and “the drug dealers” next. “But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for ten and 15 years, work a deal for them.” Asked what he would like to work on with the new Democratic majority, he answered, “I’d love to do something on immigration.” Asked whether the deportation policy went too far, he said, “Too tough,” and then, “I think it might be too tough, yeah.” He called a deal for workers such as landscapers and hotel maids “something that’s actually doable” and said Democrats had already called him about it.

Texas voters put the border near the top of their list in 2024. In the National Election Pool’s Texas exit poll, 48 percent of voters said most immigrants in the country illegally should be deported, and 92 percent of them voted for Trump. Among Texas Trump voters, 37 percent named immigration as their top issue, according to AP VoteCast as reported by ABC13 in Houston. The appetite has eased but not gone away. In University of Texas/Texas Politics Project polling, 58 percent of Texas registered voters agreed in October 2024 that immigrants living in the country illegally “should be deported immediately,” and 51 percent still agreed in August 2026.

Texas did not wait on Washington to act on that. Operation Lone Star, the state’s own border mission since 2021, has cost Texas $11 billion, the Texas Tribune reported last week, including $3.1 billion set aside for a state-built wall. The Department of Homeland Security approved $7.5 billion in September to repay part of it. The rest came out of Texas’s own budget.

The interview also showed how quickly Washington’s direction can change. Douthat noted that Sen.-elect James Talarico of Texas had said immigration was one issue he wanted to work on with the president. “Said very nice things,” Trump replied. An hour after the interview, CBS reported, Trump replaced his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, with Stephen Miller, “the architect of the president’s mass deportation policy,” a move the network said “seems to conflict with the president’s professed desire to work with Democrats on immigration.”

This has happened before. In January 2018, when a deal on young immigrants was in the works between the president and Congress, the Texian Partisan wrote that Texas’s “hope that Trump would’ve been the ONE to solve this major issue” seemed “a distant memory.” Its conclusion then still holds. Texans, it said, “may have different and more effective solutions than simple mass deportation,” but “at least they’d be Texas solutions.”

Whatever deal comes out of the next Congress will be written in Washington by 535 members of Congress, 40 of them from Texas, and signed in the White House. The state that spent $11 billion of its own money on the border will have no more say over what happens next than it has had over any of Washington’s turns on immigration.