If you wanted to sum up the potential and the reality of Donald Trump’s presidency, you could do worse than look at two questions from this week’s CBS News/YouGov poll.
The survey of American adults asked about Trump’s efforts to enforce immigration and deport illegal immigrants from the country. Did they like or dislike “Donald Trump’s goals – what you think he wants to accomplish”? And did they like or dislike “Donald Trump’s approach – the way you think he is going about it”?
A small but significant majority, 55 percent, said they liked Trump’s deportation goals, while 45 percent said they disliked those goals. But the poll found nearly the opposite breakdown on Trump’s approach to achieving those goals, with just 44 percent saying they liked it and 56 percent saying they disliked it.
This disparity highlights the political limits to Trump’s immigration enforcement: Most Americans want Trump to deport illegal immigrants, but most Americans don’t approve of the way he’s doing it.
And it’s not hard to understand why. Before this week’s raids in Southern California, which have prompted protests across the region and violent riots in parts of the Los Angeles area, the most high-profile immigration action of this new presidency was a mistake. In a March court filing, officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted that, due to an “administrative error,” the federal government had wrongly removed Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the United States to a hellish maximum-security prison in his native El Salvador.
What followed was a classic political fight of the Trump era, with the president and his supporters making mostly false, misleading, or incomplete claims about Abrego Garcia and opponents of Trump and the mainstream media overselling Abrego Garcia as an innocent father from Maryland above all reproach. Despite claiming for weeks that Abrego Garcia could not be retrieved from El Salvador to afford his case due process, the administration brought him back last week to face federal criminal charges that may or may not have been a pretext for bolstering the White House’s political arguments about deporting him where their legal arguments were weak.
But the whole incident, which was not the only questionable deportation, revealed that the Trump administration was being sloppy, imprecise, and careless on one of its signature issues. Suddenly Americans, including those who voted for Trump on the idea he would deport illegal immigrants, were faced with the possibility the wrong people might be caught up in his dragnet. As opening gambits go, this had all the hallmarks of a political loser: Trump’s initial round of deportations raised doubts his administration could do what he said it would do.
The administration was also failing to meet its own internal benchmarks for deportations, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, prompting top White House aide Stephen Miller to show up in person at ICE headquarters and demand better results. Raid workplaces, target day laborers, wait outside federal courthouses—in sum, round up undocumented people where we all know they are and bump those numbers up, went the message. And not just violent criminals, Miller reportedly urged, but anyone who is an illegal immigrant.
And so last week’s ICE raid of a Home Depot in Los Angeles kicked off the current escalation. Protests turned violent, Trump’s activation of the National Guard elicited pushback from local leaders like Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, and very soon Trump called in the Marines for further support.
When it comes to the short term, it’s hard to see how this all doesn’t redound to Trump’s political benefit. The perception, borne out by polling (including the CBS News/YouGov poll), is that Trump is working to deport violent criminals. That can only be reinforced by the images of protesters resorting to violence and members of his political opposition denying that reality.
But as the administration continues to proceed with undeniable vigor in finding, arresting, and deporting people who do not have legal status to be in the United States, the disconnect between expectations and results will delineate how far Americans are willing to let it all go. Miller’s desire for mass deportation of anyone not authorized to be in the country appears to be at odds with how even some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress want to see the federal government tackle this issue.
It’s notable that a moderate Republican congressman from California, David Valadao, had a two-pronged public statement this week about everything taking place in the Los Angeles area. The first was a political layup, with Valadao calling the violence and vandalism from rioters “unacceptable” in a social media post on Tuesday.
“I remain concerned about ongoing ICE operations throughout CA and will continue my conversations with the administration—urging them to prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years,” Valadao tweeted.
Then on Thursday, Valadao joined five other Republican members of the House on a letter requesting the administration provide statistics about the criminal records and gang ties of the roughly 100,000 individuals Trump has deported since taking office. “We are also concerned that your limited resources may be stretched to pursue individuals that do not constitute an immediate threat to public safety,” the Republicans wrote.
Remarkably, even Trump himself appears to be acknowledging the political thorniness of mass deportation, contradicting Miller’s all-of-the-above approach. On Thursday, Trump posted on his Truth Social feed that, “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,” cryptically promising that “changes are coming.”
And responding to reporters during a bill signing later on Thursday, he reiterated that perhaps not all illegal immigrants deserved to be deported, noting that many migrant workers in industries like agriculture have “been there for 20, 25 years” and “turned out to be, you know, great.”
When Stephen Miller is more Trumpy on immigration than Trump himself, it’s possible the current policy is nearing the boundaries of what most Americans will tolerate.
