In an interview broadcast on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, November 8, 2026, President Trump said he is ready to work with the Democrats, who take control of both houses of Congress in January, on a deal for illegal immigrants who have been living in the United States for years. “I’d love to do something on immigration,” he said, adding that “people have already called me.”
The President admitted that his deportation policy “might be too tough” and said it hurt him in last week’s midterm elections, because along with criminals “we also took people that had good jobs.” He drew the line this way: “Get the killers out. Get all the — the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out. But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.” He mentioned hotel and landscaping workers as the kind of people he had in mind. As for what the deal would be, he said, “we would work something out, and I think that’s something that’s actually doable.” According to Newsweek, the President agreed that such a deal would involve legal status for illegal immigrants who have no criminal record.
Legal Status Today, Citizenship Tomorrow?
To be accurate, the President did not use the words “pathway to citizenship,” and no deal has been written yet. Some in Washington are careful to say a deal might stop short of citizenship. Representative Maria Salazar, a Florida Republican, has proposed giving legal status to illegal immigrants while preventing them from becoming citizens. Even so, we have been down this road before. In 1986 President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave legal status to about 2.7 million people who were in the country illegally, and in time many of them became citizens. In return Americans were promised that the law would be enforced from then on. That promise was never kept, and the number of people living here illegally grew far larger in the years that followed.
Once millions are given legal status, the pressure to give them citizenship and the vote will only grow. With a Democratic majority writing the bill, it is hard to believe that legal status will be where it ends.
Rewarding Those Who Broke the Law
Millions of immigrants have come to this country the right way. They filled out the forms, paid the fees, passed the background checks and waited, sometimes for many years, to be allowed in. A deal that lets those who crossed the border illegally, or stayed after their visas ran out, remain here legally is unfair to every one of them. It rewards those who broke the law and tells those who obeyed it that they were foolish to wait.
It also sends a message to the rest of the world: come illegally, stay long enough, and sooner or later you will be allowed to remain. That was the lesson many took from 1986. As the Preacher wrote, when sentence against an evil work is not carried out, the hearts of men are set in them to do evil.
A Compromise Today, an Open Door Tomorrow
To be fair, what the President described is not a return to open borders. He still means to remove those with serious criminal records — the killers, the gang members and the drug dealers — and illegal crossings at the southern border have fallen dramatically since he returned to office. Under the Biden administration, encounters with illegal crossers at the southern border passed two million in each of the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, the highest numbers on record. Nothing the President said would bring that back overnight.
What he offered is a compromise: deport the criminals, and reward the rest who came in without going through the proper channels. It is a middle course that the Democrats, left to themselves, would not take. But a compromise like this does not stay where it is put. Once the principle is granted that breaking the immigration laws can be forgiven if a person stays long enough, the only question left is how far to extend it. The day a Democrat sits in the White House with control of both the House and the Senate, it is very likely that this deal will be widened — to more people, to shorter stays, and finally to citizenship — and the border itself will be enforced less and less. That is how 1986 worked out, and there is little reason to think it will be different this time.
The President’s own supporters have been quick to object. Many in his base took to social media to say they are against any kind of amnesty. Whether a deal is ever passed remains to be seen, but the direction is troubling.
How Should Christians Respond?
The Bible commands kindness to the stranger. Many who are here illegally work hard and live peaceably, and some are our brethren in Christ. Christians should treat them with kindness, pray for them and share the Gospel with them, for the Lord saves sinners from every nation.
But kindness from one person to another is not the same thing as a government setting aside its own laws. God has given civil rulers the sword to uphold the law and to punish those who do evil, and a nation that will not enforce its laws invites more lawbreaking. Christians may and should speak against a policy that rewards wrongdoing, while praying for the President and for those in authority of either party, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life. Our hope is not in a deal made in Washington, but in the Lord who rules over the nations.
For more on this subject, see The Vatican, Open Borders and Its New Voice on Migration and our report on The 2026 Midterms: Democrats Take Congress.
Sources: CBS News, 60 Minutes, November 8, 2026; Newsweek (Dan Gooding), November 9, 2026; other news reports of the interview, November 9, 2026. Written by the Webmaster, November 9, 2026.