The White House recalibrated its approach to immigration in the wake of the backlash against the death of two Americans at the hands of federal officials in Minneapolis, shifting leadership and softening its rhetoric. Yet three months later, Americans’ views of President Donald Trump’s deportations campaign remain broadly negative.

New results from The POLITICO Poll show that even as the spotlight has moved away from Trump’s mass deportations campaign and onto issues such as the economy and the war in Iran, public opinion has hardly changed, underscoring how difficult it will be for the administration to reset the immigration narrative.

In the poll conducted April 11 to April 14, half of Americans — including one quarter of his 2024 voters — said Trump’s mass deportations campaign, including his widespread deployment of ICE agents, is too aggressive. Roughly a quarter said his immigration posture is about right, while 11 percent say it is not aggressive enough.

The findings offer a warning for the Trump administration — and the GOP — as Republicans look to regain ground on immigration ahead of the midterms.

The once dominant advantage Republicans and Trump held over Democrats on immigration is imperiled, a casualty of the president’s robust enforcement efforts, aggressive crackdowns hundreds of miles from the southern border and images of federal officials detaining children.

The political vulnerability is especially acute among Hispanic voters, a crucial bloc that helped Republicans up and down the ballot in 2024.

While Trump won 46 percent of the Latino vote, the highest share of any GOP presidential candidate in modern history, a majority of Latino voters now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration (67 percent) and the economy (66 percent),according to a recent poll commissioned by Third Way and UnidosUS.

“The extent of the bottom falling out on Latino voter support for Trump is pretty staggering,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president at Third Way. “I think we realized it had softened, but it has really just absolutely eroded any gains that he and his party had made through 2024.”

The April POLITICO Poll similarly found broad dissatisfaction, with 37 percent of Americans opposing Trump’s mass deportations campaign and its implementation — a figure largely unchanged from January despite intense public attention on enforcement operations and clashes between protesters and federal officials at the time.

A majority also continue to view the increased presence of ICE agents negatively, with 51 percent saying it makes cities more dangerous, similar to the 52 percent who said the same in January, even as the administration ended its immigration surge in Minneapolis and has avoided flashy ICE deployments to other cities in the months since.

The lack of improvement in public sentiment comes despite the administration’s efforts to alter its approach after widespread backlash to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minnesota earlier this year. Trump last month ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, replacing her with former Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, and officials have moved away from high-profile raids, in addition to toning down “mass deportations” in public messaging.

White House aides and allies have instead emphasized arrests, public safety and the president’s success in securing the southern border, as Republicans seek to remind voters why they preferred the GOP on immigration for so long. The shift comes amid a broader fight over immigration enforcement funding, with Republicans now looking to steer billions more to ICE and Border Patrol through the budget reconciliation process after failing to reach a deal with Democrats on policy changes.

The White House maintains its strategy is working. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the president was elected to “secure the border and deport criminal illegal aliens, and that he “has done both.”

“The totally secure border means there have been zero releases of illegal aliens for 11 straight months, and the administration remains focused on removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens to secure American communities,” she said. “These commonsense policies are supported by countless Americans.”

But if the polling is the rock, Trump’s base is the hard place. Those who backed Trump in 2024 are much more likely to support his immigration posture. Two-thirds of these respondents say Trump’s mass deportations campaign is either about right or not aggressive enough — levels of support significantly higher than among those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris or did not vote.

And there are further divides between those Trump 2024 voters who identify as ‘MAGA’ and those who do not. A strong majority of self-identifying MAGA Trump voters — 82 percent — say his deportation campaign is either about right or not aggressive enough, while 58 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters say the same.

The White House’s messaging pivot on immigration has already drawn ire from some Trump allies. The Mass Deportation Coalition, a group of former Trump administration officials and immigration restrictionist groups, released a white paper earlier this month urging the administration to get to 1 million removals this year. This week, the group spent five figures on ads at bus stops across Washington.

“Mass deportation is broadly supported, both by Trump voters and just everyday Americans,” said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, which commissioned polling last month that suggested deportations are popular among U.S. voters. “When we continue to call out that it’s not happening, it could happen, and it should happen, we think ultimately we’re going to win.”

But at the same time, the crackdown is taking a toll on the Latino voters key to Trump’s 2024 coalition. In South Texas, the construction industry faces a labor shortage as workers are deported — or worried they might be. Across the heartland, farmers entering planting season fret about a lack of workers. In urban centers, businesses in Latino-heavy areas have seen a dropoff in sales, as some people are too scared to shop or dine.

The dropoff was so severe in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge that the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce started GoFundMe fundraisers for small businesses that were on the verge of closing, said Ramiro Cavazos, president and CEO of the USHCC. Some of the businesses closed after sales plummeted 70 percent, he said.

“It’s hard to recover from the sales that they lost, and there’s nobody there to help repair or restore them, due to the fears,” Cavazos said. “Customers have stopped coming into their regular places to visit, for fear of being picked up illegally, not because they themselves might not be legal.”

Irayda Flores, a seafood wholesaler in Arizona, estimated that 80 to 90 percent of Hispanic-owned small businesses have been affected adversely by the immigration enforcement, either due to workforce issues or a dropoff in sales.

“I was not expecting these results from the Republican side, from this new administration,” Flores said.

The dwindling support among Hispanic voters opens the door for Democrats to capitalize in this fall’s midterms, said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, vice president at UnidosUS. “The president and his party are taking a big eraser to the support they had gotten from Latino voters,” she said. “To put it in World Cup terms, [Republicans] are scoring an own goal. And now we’ll see what the opposing team does.”

Source link