Political messaging on immigration goes well beyond whether to deport people without legal status.
There's a big difference, for example, in advocating for stronger border security and booting hardened criminals from the country, versus deporting cooks and construction workers — and sending National Guards and even Marines in response to protests (when local officials didn't ask for it).
Trump's deportation policies have moved toward workplaces, as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement tries to reach the White House's goal of 3,000 deportations a day. But that presents a potential political problem for Trump.
The aggressive approach to deportations is giving Democrats a unifying message in opposition to Trump. But the party still faces long-term problems when it comes to setting out a vision for immigration policy that would give Americans confidence in turning the reins over to them instead of Republicans.
What does public opinion polling say?
Polling on specific aspects of immigration policy is sparse and somewhat conflicting.
In general, people support President Trump's immigration plans more than his economic ones. And multiple polls have clearly shown in the past year that people trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle immigration.
But surveys out this week showed differing results, especially in light of Trump's response to the protests:
—A CBS poll, conducted before the protests in Los Angeles, found 54% approve of his deportation policies.
—A Quinnipiac survey, on the other hand, conducted around the time of the L.A. protests in opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on workplaces, from June 5-9, showed 56% disapprove of the president's handling of deportations.
—Reuters/Ipsos found that 50% of people disapproved of Trump's response to the protests so far, while 35% approved. Forty-eight percent thought Trump should deploy the military to bring order to violent protests, 41% did not. By a 49% to 40% margin, they also said he's gone too far with arrests of immigrants.
—AP/NORC found 46% approve of Trump's handling of immigration, higher than his overall approval rating in the survey.
During his first term, polling indicated a higher level of disapproval for Trump's handling of immigration. Specific policies, like family separation, were very unpopular.
But immigration certainly helped Trump during the 2024 presidential election, largely because the mood in the country changed.
In 2017, only 35% said they thought immigration should decrease, Gallup found. But that jumped 20 points by 2024. It was the highest since October of 2001.
That was a different political moment, too – just a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. But it was also the last time encounters at the southern border were as high as during the last couple of years of the Biden presidency.
Republican pushback
The numbers can be sliced a number of different ways, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb to look at members of Congress in competitive districts to see how they're responding.
One of those is Republican Rep. David Valadao of California. He said in a post on X that while he condemned the "violence and vandalism" seen in L.A., he was "concerned" about how the Trump administration has been broadening its deportation efforts.
He said he was "urging [the administration] to prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the [Central] Valley for years."
That was echoed by other Latino Republican leaders, including Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, who is chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Republican Conference.
"We all need to focus on convicted, criminal illegal aliens," Gonzales said on CNN on Tuesday. "If we focus there and we're not going after the milker of cows who's in 103-degree weather – going after that guy, and we're going after the convicted criminal, I think we're on the right path."
But there are lots of people in the White House who would disagree with that, including Stephen Miller. The presidential adviser is an architect of a lot of Trump's hard-line culture war policies, including immigration, but also the administration's stance on transgender rights and diversity initiatives.
Back in January, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that if people crossed the border illegally, they are inherently criminals.
"[I]f you are an individual, a foreign national, who illegally enters the United States of America, you are, by definition, a criminal," she said, adding that while Trump believes the focus should be on "criminal drug dealers, the rapists, the murderers, the individuals who have committed heinous acts," that "doesn't mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation's borders are off the table."
After the stepped-up workplace raids and the ensuing pushback from some Hispanic GOP members, Trump seemed to be hinting at dialing back.
"Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace," Trump said Thursday on his social media platform.
Trump – who employed immigrants for years at his hotels and golf courses, many of whom were in the country illegally, according to a 2019 investigation by The Washington Post, made similar remarks at a news conference later that day.
"Our farmers are being hurt badly by – you know – they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years," he said. "They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great. And we're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back, because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not."
That was welcomed by people like Valadao, who posted, "Farmworkers are the backbone of the ag industry, and I'm happy to see President Trump understands the urgency of this issue."
But there haven't been any concrete shifts yet in the way ICE is conducting deportations. The change in tone, however, shows – at least from a public-relations perspective – that the politics of this can be tricky. While there's general support for decreasing immigration after a period of increased border crossings, it doesn't mean people overall want to see immigrants treated inhumanely.
Democratic response
For Democrats, there are challenges, too, but some are starting to feel that they are coalescing around an immigration message, at least one in opposition to Trump.
"The lesson or the signal from voters is not to abandon immigrants," said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist. "But what voters do want is a clear and cogent policy around how you manage the country's borders. …This is a redux of Barack Obama's famous, 'We're a nation of immigrants, and we're a nation of laws.' "
Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is running for Congress in San Francisco against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In general, he thinks Democrats don't fight hard enough, especially on economics. But on immigration right now, he said he thinks that the party and people like California Gov. Gavin Newsom are striking the right tone.
"I don't think anybody in the country sees a mom getting picked up from a school pickup line by masked agents in unmarked vans and thinks, 'Ah, yeah, that's what I voted for. That's what I want, that's humane,' " Chakrabarti said. "I don't think that matters if you're progressive, moderate or Republican. I think that's just basic common sense about where we want the country to be."
Of course, that does not mean that Democrats across the spectrum have settled on a unified vision for how to deal with immigration in the future if they were put back in charge.
"The Democrats haven't yet figured out how to tell a compelling, affirmative story around immigration," said Ramzi Kassem, who worked on immigration policy in the Biden White House and teaches law at the City University of New York. "And I think that's been the downfall of the Democratic Party on this issue.
"The fact that there's basically a narrative vacuum on the issue of immigration, and that's particularly dangerous, where the political opposition here – the Republicans – have a pretty coherent and simple and overwhelmingly negative message and story to tell around immigration – and they keep on hammering those themes home every chance they get."
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