President Donald Trump admitted that his administration could stand to adopt “a softer touch” in immigration enforcement.
During a Wednesday interview with NBC News’ Tom Llamas, Trump was asked what he had learned from Minneapolis.
“I learned that maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch,” the president said. “But you still have to be tough.”
The 79-year-old continued, “We’re dealing with really hard criminals. But look, I’ve called the people. I’ve called the governor. I’ve called the mayor. Spoke to ‘em. Had great conversations with them. And then I see them ranting and raving out there. Literally as though a call wasn’t made.”
“We’ve done a great job everywhere,” he added. Trump said his administration had “done well” in Minnesota and suggested “inflammation” was occurring in another part of the country, but did not specify where.
The Daily Beast has contacted the DHS for comment.
The president also complained about the “bad publicity” his administration had received in the wake of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both of whom were killed at the hands of federal immigration officers in Minneapolis last month.
“You do thousands of arrests, you arrest thousands of rapists, you arrest thousands of the worst people, you arrest the drug dealers, I mean, we had drug kingpins, we had murderers, thousands. No incident, we bring them back to their country,” he told Llamas.
“Two people, it’s bad, I hate it. I hate even talking about it. Two people out of tens of thousands. Okay. And you get bad publicity.”
Trump’s sit-down with Llamas came after border czar Tom Homan, who had been sent into Minneapolis to replace Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino and “de-escalate” the situation on the ground, announced that 700 immigration agents would be withdrawn from Minneapolis earlier on Wednesday. 2000 agents will remain in the city for now.
“I brought a different set of eyes to this; I’ve done this a long time,” Homan said. “We made this operation more streamlined, and we established a unified chain of command so everybody knows what’s going on... This is smart law enforcement, and smart law enforcement makes us safer.”
In addition to lamenting the bad publicity his administration has received, the president also complained about not receiving enough credit for the good work they have done.
Referring to Kristi Noem’s performance as Homeland Security Secretary, Trump said, “We have the best crime numbers that we’ve had in 125 years. I think she’s doing a very good job. Again, public relations, she’s not getting credit for the job that she does.”
As the face of the administration’s brutal immigration crackdown, Noem has faced substantial pressure and scrutiny from the public in the wake of ICE’s disastrous incursion into Minnesota, with even some of her fellow Republicans calling for her to be fired.
“Everyone gives me A+ on the border,” Trump told Llamas. “The border was a disaster, people were pouring into our country, they don’t even try and come up now.”
The president reached his lowest polling numbers on immigration in the wake of Pretti’s killing, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted the weekend of his death finding that just 39 percent of Americans approve of how he has handled immigration.
A majority of respondents—58 percent—felt that ICE agents had gone “too far,” including one in five Republicans.
