President Donald Trump privately told aides that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller had gone too far on immigration after first lady Melania Trump complained that people she knew were being deported, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
The revelation came in a wide-ranging Journal post-mortem examining what went wrong for Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which Democrats seized control of both the House and Senate and won several key governor’s races.
According to the report, Trump went back and forth on immigration throughout the year, at times telling aides he wanted an even tougher crackdown. But after the first lady objected to people she knew getting swept up in deportations, the president began telling aides that Miller, the architect of the administration’s aggressive enforcement campaign, had pushed too far.
It remains unclear when Melania Trump raised her concerns or which individuals she was referring to. Neither the president nor the first lady has publicly addressed the reported exchange.
The Journal also reported that Republicans in Texas and Florida privately complained to the White House about the scope of the deportation effort. Enforcement operations reached construction sites, factories and Home Depot stores, and those targeted included nonviolent migrants.
Miller has been the driving force behind some of Trump’s most hardline immigration policies across both of his terms, and has championed the goal of carrying out the largest mass deportation program in American history.
The administration’s enforcement push did deliver results at the border. The Journal noted that illegal crossings fell to their lowest level in decades. But the operation also sparked clashes in American cities, including in Minneapolis, where two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal immigration agents last winter.
Those incidents fueled a voter backlash that appeared to show up at the ballot box. According to the Journal, counties that were at least 80% Hispanic backed Democrats by 40 percentage points on Tuesday, a sharp reversal for a party that had made gains with Hispanic voters in 2024.
Immigration was not the only issue weighing on Republicans. A senior administration official told the Journal that when aides presented Trump with polling in the spring and summer showing voters were worried about affordability, the president dismissed the numbers as fake. The official added that Trump at times told aides he did not care about the midterms at all, and had grown more focused on foreign affairs and his historical legacy than on domestic politics.
Separately, the Daily Beast noted that one person deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement was Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian former model and the ex-girlfriend of Paolo Zampolli, a longtime Trump friend and former envoy who has said he introduced the president to the first lady. The Trumps celebrated New Year’s 2022 alongside Zampolli and Ungaro. The reports did not say whether Ungaro was among the people Melania Trump raised with her husband.
Despite the reported private frustration, the White House has maintained that its immigration priorities have not changed.
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