Months of surveys reveal an American Latino and general population increasingly opposed to President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda and overall approach to immigration, a group of pollsters said during a recent press briefing.
And a deteriorating U.S. economy hasn’t helped matters, said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice.
“Trump ran on a promise to make America safer and bring costs down for working families. Instead, he’s built a mass deportation machine that’s tearing families and communities apart, and American families are footing the bill,” she said during the briefing joined by researchers from Equis, Navigator Research and Third Way.
Americans have watched for nearly two years now as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol agents have assaulted neighborhoods, raided workplaces and schools, and arrested and sometimes killed immigrants and protesters, Cardenas said. “And they have seen enough. Poll after poll across the political spectrum shows the public rejecting the Trump-Miller mass deportation agenda.”
“Poll after poll across the political spectrum shows the public rejecting the Trump-Miller mass deportation agenda.”
Equis found a significant gap between the way the administration is carrying out detention and deportation and Americans’ preference for policies that target border safety, protect their neighborhoods and focus on the “worst of the worst” criminal elements. “Just a few months into Trump’s second term, 66% of Latinos believed that his enforcement policies had gone too far,” the organization said in a study released in October.
That research cited a recent poll by Unidos US that found 45% of Latino voters fear harassment and racial profiling in their communities, and another by KFF/New York Times that reported Latinos’ worries about detention or deportation recently jumped from 33% to 50% for lawfully present immigrants and from 12% to 31% among naturalized Americans.
A majority of Latinos (64%) said they want the federal government to focus on getting “back to basics” on immigration by providing opportunities for success for working people and safety in their communities, the Equis study reported.
“When we think back to 2024, the majority of Latino voters who supported Trump really did believe that he was going to target enforcement narrowly and focus on violent criminals,” added María Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez, senior research director at Equis. “It is in the breaking of that promise that we have seen shifts away from Trump and Republicans, most notably among Latino voters. One of the top reasons cited for that movement has consistently been Trump’s immigration overreach, and it fits into a broader theme of broken promises from the campaign.”
Navigator Research reported 55% of Americans disapprove of the way the president is handling immigration, while 41% approve. However, his net -20 favorable rating on the issue in January dropped to -27 by October, translating to 33% approving and 60% disapproving.
In a separate study titled “Americans are Fed Up with Cruel Immigration Policies,” the organization’s polling measured Trump’s net favorability on deportation, specifically, shifting from +10 the month he resumed office to -14% in March, equaling to 40% in support and 54% opposed.
That project also found 60% with unfavorable views of ICE, the peak since Trump took office. At the same time, 62% said ICE has been overly aggressive in its activities compared to 22% who said the agency has reached the right balance. About 10% said the agency has not been aggressive enough.
In addition, Navigator Research reported 58% of respondents believe Congress should withhold funding for ICE until its approach changes, even if that would require shutting down the Department of Homeland Security. And most respondents (80%) said they heard at least some news about ICE’s deployment to Minneapolis and other cities earlier in the year, and 78% had heard about killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by immigration agents.
“Despite this familiarity gap, Americans are deeply concerned about these stories when they hear about them,” Navigator Research said in the March report. “At least six in 10 Americans are concerned about all of the stories mentioned. The story eliciting the most concern was the one Americans knew the least about: Dire conditions at migrant detention centers, including contaminated food, measles outbreaks, and even deaths (47% aware – 68% concerned).”
Tina Tang
Tina Tang, director of polling and analytics for the research group, added that 60% of U.S. adults want Republicans to focus on the economy and less on immigration. “We are now tracking the highest level of Trump regret of his second term: One in four people who voted for him in 2024 now regret their vote.”
ICE has been mentioned organically in focus groups to explain that regret, Tang said. “For many of these voters, the administration isn’t solving the problems they voted to fix, and its actions are creating new problems they never expected to face.”
Sarah Pierce
Increasingly, Americans are expressing a desire for responsible enforcement of immigration with a focus on criminals, border and pathways to legal residency, said Sarah Pierce, director of social policy at Third Way.
“The message that did by far the worst in our testing was the maximalist enforcement approach modeled by this administration. However unfortunate it is, this administration is proving to the American public and to our politicians that this approach to immigration enforcement doesn’t resonate with the American people.”
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