Once upon a time it used to be an anomaly for presidents to dip below a 50% approval rating, a sign that their administrations’ best-laid plans had gone awry. For the past few decades, with the rise of hyperpartisanship, it’s become the norm to see those numbers lounging around the mid-to-high 40s on a good day. President Donald Trump is no exception — but even as he’s floundered overall and his performance on the economy has languished, immigration has been seen as a silver lining for him.
It’s true that in poll after poll, including the latest NBC News poll, released Sunday, immigration has been Trump’s “strongest issue.” But it’s a mistake to conflate that measurement of relative strength with his being strong on the issue overall. If anything, the polling from the last week shows yet again that, when the spotlight is on the way Trump’s deportation campaign is playing out, Americans aren’t liking what they’re seeing. Democrats should take notice of the opportunity.
It’s a mistake to conflate a measurement of Trump's relative strength on immigration with his being strong on the issue overall.
The NBC News poll, which was conducted from May 30 to June 10, shows a slight majority of U.S. adults approving of how Trump is handling “border security and immigration.” Of the 51% of survey respondents who back him on that front, 32% strongly approve, while another 17% only somewhat approve. The same is true on the flip side, with 17% somewhat disapproving and 34% strongly disapproving.
But that survey was finishing up just as national focus was swinging back toward immigration. A new round of anti-deportation protests in Los Angeles kicked off on June 6 and were met with an extremely heavy-handed response from the Trump administration. We’ve had a few polls drop that were conducted either just before or just after those demonstrations began, and they show a definite contraction of support for Trump’s policies.
Quinnipiac University recently released a poll conducted from June 5 to 9, right as the L.A. protests were peaking in terms of coverage. Only 43% of those surveyed approved of Trump’s handling of immigration issues, with 54% disapproving. Likewise, The Washington Post and George Mason University ran a text message-based poll last Tuesday that found only 37% of those who responded approved of “the way President Trump is handling immigration enforcement, including deportations.”
The most telling data, though, comes from examining Trump’s approval rating over the last few months. AP-NORC, which also had its poll in the field from June 5 to 9, found 46% of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. That marks a drop from its questionnaires in late March and early May, when he was polling at 49%, but it syncs up with his lower standing in late April. The change is within the margin of error for the survey (+/- 4%), but the repetition and the timing make it particularly noteworthy.
Even more telling is a new poll Reuters/Ipsos released Monday, which showed Trump’s approval rating on immigration “softened to 44% from 47% in mid-May.” Unlike the other surveys, this one was conducted June 11 to 16, encompassing the aftermath of the L.A. protests and the lead-up to last weekend’s “No Kings” protests. The substantial drop is interesting on its own but even more so when you look at an accompanying chart. There’s a clear point in April when respondents’ views on Trump’s immigration policies soured, leaving him underwater on the issue, only for the numbers to pick back up again the following month.
It’s reasonable to conclude that when Americans see the full scope of the harm that ICE’s deportation spree is causing, they are opposed to it.
Early in his return to office, according to a February survey from the Pew Research Center, the overall view of Trump’s immigration policy was positive. At the time, 59% of U.S. adults told Pew that they either strongly approved or somewhat approved of “increasing efforts to deport people living in the U.S. illegally.” But as the White House began to put its more aggressive tactics into play, including more Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and snap deportations to El Salvador, views on immigration began to shift.
When migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in April, the truly callous and arbitrary nature of those deportations was firmly in view. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll from around then noted the change, as 53% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s immigration policies broadly. YouGov also found a major drop in net approval from March to early May on two fronts: “border security (to +4 from +19 in March) and deportation (to -2 from +15).”
And, more recently, a CBS News poll released last week showed that while a majority of U.S. adults — 55% — support Trump’s deportation goals, only 44% support his approach. It similarly found 63% of those surveyed thought that detainees should get court hearings first before being deported. It’s reasonable to conclude, then, that when Americans see the full scope of the harm that ICE’s deportation spree is causing, they are opposed to it.
It’s time, then, to abandon the fiction that Trump is too strong on immigration to take on directly. Some Democrats were concerned back in April that there was too much attention on immigration and deportation versus economic issues like tariffs. As we saw in the shift that AP-NORC tracked, Trump’s polling numbers on immigration did rise back up again as the focus moved away from the issue, only to dip again now that the spotlight has been placed back on it.
It would be a mistake for Democrats to let that focus dim again, leaving him free to escalate even further, at a time when even Trump himself has apparently begun to realize that his mass deportations overreach could be coming back to haunt him.
