Trump Says ‘There Won’t Be Amnesty.’ His DHS Chief Adds ‘Zero Change’ and a Veto Promise.

President Trump has now said it every way a person can say it. “There’s no amnesty, no anything.” “There won’t be amnesty.” “My policy hasn’t changed.” And on Tuesday night his Homeland Security secretary went on national television and put it in writing, so to speak: “Zero change,” Markwayne Mullin said. “Amnesty will never be on the table.”

For anybody who spent the last week wondering whether the midterms had shaken the president off his signature issue, that’s about as clear an answer as Washington ever gives.

How the question came up

It started with an interview. On “60 Minutes”, Trump talked about the millions of people who came in under the last administration, said some of them now have good jobs and pay taxes, and allowed that enforcement may have been tougher than it needed to be in some cases. Some of his own supporters heard that as the first step toward a deal with the incoming Democratic Congress. A few days later he named Stephen Miller, the man most identified with his deportation push, as White House chief of staff, which told you plenty about where his head actually was.

Then on Monday he walked into the White House briefing room for the first time in more than six months, with UFC boss Dana White at his side, and a reporter asked him directly whether he’d told Miller he wanted changes to deportations. According to a transcript of the briefing, Trump didn’t hedge.

“No, no, we have a very strong deportation policy,” he said. “There’s no amnesty, no anything. We keep that. But we focus on the worst of the worst. We want to get the murderers out.”

He went on to say the Biden years let in roughly 25 million people, a number he’s used before, and that among them were 11,888 murderers, a figure he cited from the podium. “We’ve gotten most of them,” he said. Then, about the people who came in illegally but have since settled into jobs: “There won’t be amnesty. … My policy hasn’t changed.”

In a separate answer, clipped by the White House’s Rapid Response account, he explained why. “We’re not going to have amnesty or anything,” Trump said. “People are going to do it the right way. They have to do it; it’s unfair to other people.”

That’s the part I think a lot of folks miss when they hear the word “deal.” Trump has said for years he’s open to talking with Democrats on immigration. Talking isn’t the same as handing out legal status to people who skipped the line, and his whole argument is about the people who didn’t skip it.

Mullin goes on Ingraham

If Monday was the president, Tuesday was the man running the department that does the work.

Laura Ingraham opened her Fox News interview with Mullin by asking him to promise “the 77 million people who voted for President Trump that there is no change in his immigration policy.” He didn’t need a second to think about it. As Mediaite transcribed it: “Zero change. The president made that very clear. We’re still going after the worst of the worst and amnesty will never be on the table.”

Then he added the part that matters most for the next two years. “The president has made it very clear, he controls the veto,” Mullin said. “So if they were to send something over that the president and the Republicans don’t agree with, he can veto it and he will veto it.”

Democrats will hold both chambers in January. They can write whatever immigration bill they want. What they can’t do, without a two-thirds vote neither chamber will have, is make it law over Trump’s objection. Mullin was telling the base that the pen is still in the right hand.

What “the worst of the worst” means on the ground

Mullin also pushed back on the idea that enforcement is slowing. He told Ingraham the department is deporting roughly 3,600 people a day, which is his figure, and that “we haven’t slowed down at all.”

“We’ve reprioritized what we’re doing by going after the worst of the worst,” he said, naming murderers, rapists, child predators and cartel members.

He was candid about the tactical shift, too. Agents are moving away from workplace raids and toward warrant operations in cities, he said, and when you serve a warrant on a dangerous target, “they’re never by themselves.” The people standing next to a wanted man often turn out to be in the country illegally as well. In plain English: the priority list has a top, but it doesn’t have a bottom.

Ingraham pressed him hard for more than seven minutes, and she didn’t pretend otherwise. She cited a Fox exit poll in which, she said, 92 percent of Trump voters thought the administration hasn’t gone far enough, and she told him flatly that the base would not be with any deal. Mullin’s answer kept coming back to the same two things: no legal status for people who came in illegally, and the veto.

“If they want to talk about making people that enter this country here illegally legal, that’s a non-starter,” he said.

Where it goes from here

The honest version of the next year looks like this. Democrats will come in with plenty of ideas, from new limits on ICE to protections for people brought here as children. Trump has said he’ll listen, and he has a long record of saying exactly that. But on the core question his voters care about, the White House, the DHS secretary and the new chief of staff are now all on record saying the same thing.

There’s also something to the politics here that the chatter after Election Day missed. Trump didn’t lose his nerve on the border after a bad night for his party. He walked into the briefing room, took the question head-on and gave the answer his voters wanted. His DHS secretary repeated it the next night, on the show those voters watch.

Whatever Democrats send over in 2027, the message from this week is that it will have to get past a president who says he hasn’t changed his mind, and who still has the veto.