Steve Bannon Says MAGA Agenda Hit Resistance and 'Just Folded' on Deportations

On Monday, Steve Bannon said "we hit some resistance on the agenda and then just folded," then pointed to mass deportations as an example. It was an unusual note of self-criticism from one of the MAGA movement's loudest voices, delivered the night before the midterm elections.

The War Room host made the remark while talking with Natalie Winters, the show's White House correspondent, who was broadcasting from the White House lawn. Most of the episode was an attack on left-wing groups that the two accused of planning street protests after Tuesday's vote. The deportation comment came near the end of that segment.

What Steve Bannon Said About Mass Deportations

Winters had argued that the MAGA agenda would have delivered a "knockout blast victory" for Donald Trump if judges had not obstructed it. Bannon answered with a caveat of his own.

"Well, if you hadn't initiated a war, I mean, this thing was starting to hit on all cylinders," he said. He did not say which war he meant.

"We hit some resistance on the agenda and then just folded," Bannon went on. "Let's go to mass deportations. The people in Minneapolis, the people in Portland, the people who've been fighting in Los Angeles, the people that are fighting the mass deportation agenda the most are inextricably linked with the funding and the operations."

Bannon did not say who folded or point to any specific decision. He went straight back to his main argument, that the activists who opposed ICE are the same "foot soldiers" he expects in the streets after the election. He did not call on Trump to change course.

Winters went further. "I think we bent the knee there," she said. "We let them see that, you know, you give an inch, they take a mile and all of a sudden, the deportation numbers, I certainly don't think are what we voted for or what we wanted." Later, as Bannon called for rescissions, stripping the groups' tax-exempt status and shutting down the government if Democrats won't pass budgets, she said: "I'd maybe add we're going to deport like 20 million people at least."

Deportations Compared With the Administration's Goal

In May 2025, the White House set a target of 1 million deportations a year. The administration has not reached it. A Migration Policy Institute fact sheet published in October by Marc Rosenblum, who led DHS's statistics office until July, found that ICE and Customs and Border Protection carried out about 620,000 deportations in fiscal 2025 on an annualized basis. They were on track for 660,000 in fiscal 2026, "well below" the goal.

Those figures count removals and returns together. ICE's narrower count of formal removals reached 356,389 for fiscal 2026 through mid-July, ABC News reported. That was already well above the 271,484 removals in fiscal 2024, Joe Biden's last full year. MPI noted that DHS has not published its usual detailed enforcement reports since January 2025.

Minneapolis, Portland and Los Angeles

The three cities Bannon named were the sites of the administration's most contested enforcement pushes. In June 2025, Trump sent about 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles after protests against stepped-up immigration enforcement, and California Governor Gavin Newsom sued to stop the deployment.

In Portland, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut permanently barred the president in November 2025 from deploying the Guard to protect the city's ICE facility.

Minneapolis is the clearest case of a pullback. During Operation Metro Surge, Renee Good was killed on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino left the city after the backlash, and on Feb. 12 border czar Tom Homan announced the surge was ending. "I don't want to see any more bloodshed," Homan said, CBS News reported.

What Happens Next

In his closing, Bannon's demands were about money, not enforcement. He praised "Russ and those guys," a reference to Russ Vought's Office of Management and Budget, and said they "should be coming, I think, with big rescissions packages right after tomorrow's vote." He also repeated his complaint that USAID's work was shifted to the State Department rather than shut down.

He also asked Winters whether "the Trump administration right now understands the mortal threat that's coming for him?" "No, I think they should," she replied.

Voters head to the polls today with Republicans trailing by 8.5 points in PolitiKool's polling average of the generic congressional ballot. Whether deportations come up again in the next Congress may depend on which party holds it.