Here’s a clear sign President Donald Trump knows his approach to immigration is losing in the court of public opinion. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair “privately urged House Republicans on Tuesday to stop emphasizing ‘mass deportations’ and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals,” Axios reported this week, citing sources in the room.
But this proposed “fix” is almost certainly a lost cause.
There is plenty of data showing Trump’s immigration agenda is not popular. According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in January, about 6 in 10 Americans said Trump has “gone too far” in sending federal immigration agents into U.S. cities, and about the same share disapproved of Trump’s overall handling of immigration. Approval of Trump’s overall handling of immigration has plunged about 10 percentage points from his first month in office, according to AP-NORC data. This pattern of decline in support for Trump’s immigration program has surfaced across many other surveys, and probably explains a good chunk of the decline in Trump’s overall approval ratings.
Trump knows his mass expulsions and aggressive tactics have alienated the public.
There are also warning signs that Trump’s coalition could fray over immigration: A Politico poll conducted in January found that 1 in 5 voters who supported Trump in 2024 think his mass deportation campaign is too aggressive.
What’s interesting is that this emerging political reality seems to be registering for Trump. As he announced that he was withdrawing immigration agents from Minneapolis in February, Trump spoke publicly of the need to use a “softer touch” on immigration enforcement. Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have fallen to their lowest level since September in what appears to be an ICE effort to go about its mass deportation project somewhat less conspicuously.
Yet such efforts to tweak the branding — including counseling Republicans to play up the deportations of “violent criminals” rather than immigrants more broadly — are doomed.
Trump’s political identity is predicated on a sweeping nativism. He framed his entry into national politics around backing the racist “birther” conspiracy theory about then-President Barack Obama. He launched his first presidential campaign warning that Mexico was sending “rapists” to the U.S. The centerpiece of his 2024 campaign was launching “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He all but named the vicious 1950s “Operation Wetback” deportation program as inspiration. There is a clear takeaway from his efforts to rescind birthright citizenship, reduce legal immigration “from all Third World Countries,” target immigrants for arrest based on their nationality and outright racist rants about Somalis: Trump has never targeted only the “worst of the worst” criminals. He is using deportations to restrict and reshape American identity. Given everything he has said and done, not just in office but also in the runup to his second term, it is implausible that Trump could convince the public that he’s becoming gentler or moderate on immigration. Furthermore, as my colleague Hayes Brown pointed out of shifting ICE and Border Patrol tactics, even after Trump’s “soft touch” pivot on deportations, the operation still going nearly full-throttle. The rate of recent deportations might be reduced, but it’s still four times greater than during the last year of the Biden administration. And Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who constructed Trump’s immigration policy, “still has three more years and billions of dollars already appropriated to ICE and DHS more broadly to help bring to life his vision of an America purged of its immigrants,” Brown wrote. “Even though ICE and Border Patrol are at least temporarily restrained, DHS is still procuring warehouses and factories to convert into the detention facilities that Miller seeks to fill.” All of this means that while Trump’s ICE deployments may have a somewhat lower profile in the near time — or, say, through the midterm elections, to reduce the likelihood of driving angry voters to the polls — there is no reason to think clashes with activists and mistreatment of immigrants will not resume during this administration. Trump knows his mass expulsions and aggressive tactics have alienated the public. That doesn’t mean a leopard can change its spots.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
