Recent public opinion data reveal a significant leftward shift among Americans on immigration, as support for Trump’s heavy-handed approach plummets. In a poll conducted by CBS/YouGov from July 16 to July 18, 44 percent of respondents approved of the administration’s handling of immigration, while 56 percent disapproved. That marked a significant decline from February, when 54 percent of Americans backed the new president’s handling of the issue. “Approval of the deportation program has slipped over these months to become slightly net-negative now, with support becoming more exclusively drawn from Republicans and MAGA identifiers,” CBS News wrote of the results.
The declining support for Trump’s immigration policies comes amid a broader softening on the issue. In the CBS/YouGov poll, 53 percent of participants said the approach of Trump and the Republican Party was “too tough,” while only 18 percent said it was “not tough enough.” And in a July Gallup poll, just 30 percent of respondents said they wanted to see immigration reduced—down from 55 percent last year. A majority of both parties supported allowing undocumented immigrants to become U.S. citizens, with 78 percent overall supporting a pathway to citizenship. A record 79 percent said immigration was good for the country.
In many ways, analysts say, the shifting public opinion on immigration can be seen as an equal and opposite reaction to the president’s increasingly unpopular policies. The sweeping and often botched execution of the long-promised crackdown has generated a storm of headlines and touched individual communities, giving Americans a firsthand look at the practical impact of mass deportations. Instances of racial profiling, excessive force, unwarranted entries, and other alleged abuses perpetrated by federal agents have all raised questions about the latitude officers have to carry out Trump’s agenda. Once in custody, detainees have reported inhumane conditions, including overcrowding, a lack of food, and inadequate medical care.
Some proponents of the administration’s approach argue that such aggressive action is necessary to combat the sclerosis that had built up over decades of lax immigration enforcement. “Those being removed are a mix of criminals and deportation fugitives, on the one hand, and ordinary illegals, on the other,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, recently wrote for The Spectator. “Worksite enforcement is essential to the second track of the strategy: self-deportation. If the only illegals being arrested and deported are criminals, and you, like most illegals, are not a criminal (other than immigration-related crimes), you have little to worry about and so why would you leave?”
But the White House’s sweeping detentions and deportations have also been at the center of many of its ongoing legal battles. In particular, courts have challenged Trump’s ability to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a rarely used wartime authority that allows the executive to remove “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a country or government at war with the U.S. or engaged in “invasion or predatory incursion,” provided the individuals are not younger than 14 or naturalized citizens. The use of the obscure law, which allows the president to deny foreign nationals due process, is currently being weighed by multiple federal judges.
Yet, on Friday, the Trump administration sent more than 250 Venezuelan deportees held in an El Salvador megaprison—many of whom had been removed under the Alien Enemies Act—to Caracas. In exchange, the administration said, 10 Americans detained in Venezuela would be returned to the United States.
The swap quickly came under scrutiny, both for its reliance on the dubious legal authority and for the precedent it set: At least some of the deported immigrants had fled Venezuela to escape the authoritarian regime of President Nicolás Maduro. “In one way, this deal is actually worse than the usual hostage exchange, where a democratic state sends captured terrorists or other operatives back to a terrorist group like Hamas or an authoritarian regime like Russia,” Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, wrote in Reason magazine. “Here, the men we are sending back are innocent people who fled an oppressive government, now being forcibly returned to it.”
But as backlash to the White House’s mass deportations grows, the administration is preparing to double down. The Republican tax and spending bill passed by Congress this month allocated $45 billion for immigration detention centers, as well as $30 billion for additional ICE personnel and other operational costs. The windfall made ICE the best-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, boasting a larger budget than the combined budgets of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service.
The administration is now seeking to use the funds to significantly expand its detention centers. According to a Saturday report by the Wall Street Journal, ICE plans to expand its capacity to 100,000 beds by the end of the year, up from 40,000 when Trump retook office. In addition to constructing thousands of tents, the report noted, the federal government has pushed Republican governors to open state-run facilities.
One such site—“Alligator Alcatraz”—is already operational in South Florida, constructed on an abandoned airstrip in the Florida Everglades. “There is only one road leading in, and the only way out is a one-way flight,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of the center, which she described as a “low-cost” way to execute Trump’s mass deportation campaign. “It is isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife and unforgiving terrain. The facility will have up to 5,000 beds to house, process, and deport criminal illegal aliens.”
But, despite accepting immigrants for less than a month, the site has already produced its fair share of controversy. Migrants have recounted dangerous conditions in the swampy and remote environment, and, on Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit claiming detainees were unable to reach their attorneys. In the House of Representatives, Florida Democrats have introduced legislation—the “No Cages in the Everglades Act”—to defund the detention facility, though it’s unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-held lower chamber.
As our colleague Kevin Williamson concluded in his recent piece on the ICE crackdown in Los Angeles, the question of what to do with the more than 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the country is an incredibly thorny one.
Would wages for farm workers and hotel cleaners be higher if there were less immigration overall and fewer illegal workers in the market? Probably. Would prices for food and hotel rooms rise as a result? Probably. Are the people who dislike high levels of immigration on cultural rather than economic grounds racists and xenophobes? Some of them. Are there good-faith, non-economic objections to high levels of immigration and, particularly, to uncontrolled immigration? Of course. And as a matter of practical politics: Would Donald Trump be president of these United States, doing untold damage to our institutions and standing in the world, if Republicans or Democrats had taken a halfway serious approach to the very real issues related to immigration 20 years ago? I don’t think that he would.
How these things get worked out in Los Angeles is probably going to be different from how they get worked out in Greenwich or Detroit or Seattle. I think of Los Angeles a little like I think of Miami, Las Vegas, and New Orleans: I am glad that those cities are there and that they have the respective characters they have, but you don’t want the whole country to be Calle Ocho or the Strip or Bourbon Street. (And, in fact, there is a lot more to those cities than their most famous thoroughfares.) Los Angeles is complicated, home to a lot of tech and media, a lot of eastward- and southward-facing international trade, but also to the nation’s largest and most economically significant garment-manufacturing sector. Los Angeles County, in and of itself, has as much socioeconomic complexity as a good-sized European country, with a population somewhere between those of Austria and Greece. We aren’t going to sort that complexity out by staging Operation Overlord in miniature in the parking lot of Del Taco.
