Americans largely oppose recent efforts by Donald Trump’s administration to scale up its deportation program, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, with a rising majority saying the president has gone too far in carrying out deportations.
In the latest survey, 55% say the president has gone too far when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the US illegally, up 10 points since February.
Opposition among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents has risen in that time from widespread to nearly universal: Ninety percent of Democratic-aligned adults now say that Trump’s deportation policy has gone too far, while just 15% of Republican-aligned adults say the same.
A 57% majority also say they oppose plans to build new detention facilities capable of holding up to 100,000 undocumented immigrants, while 53% oppose increasing the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement by billions of dollars — two White House priorities reflected in the sweeping policy bill that Trump recently signed into law.
Nearly 6 in 10 oppose efforts to end birthright citizenship, another Trump priority. The courts are reviewing the president’s executive order seeking to bar birthright citizenship for children born on American soil to parents who were in the country unlawfully or who were there lawfully but temporarily.
Overall, just shy of half, 46%, say Trump’s immigration policies have made the country safer, and 42% say the federal government has been careful about following the law in carrying out deportations. Both figures are largely unchanged since April. The president’s approval ratings are around 40% for his handling both of immigration in general and deportations specifically
Less support for targeting immigrants without criminal records
In CNN’s poll, 59% of Americans oppose arresting and detaining undocumented immigrants who have resided in the United States for years with no criminal record.
That echoes a theme seen in much immigration polling this year — support for immigration enforcement tends to erode when pollsters specify that people without criminal records or longtime residents will be among those affected. A CNN review of government data found that most immigrants taken into ICE custody between last October and May had no serious criminal convictions.
While only about one-quarter of Republicans and Republican-leaners are opposed to arrests aimed at this group, just shy of half — 47% — offer outright support, far below the 83% who approve of his handling of deportations overall.
“The most important issue is how ICE is focusing on immigrants with no criminal history,” wrote one California woman polled, who stood among the minority of Republicans who thought Trump had gone too far with his deportation campaign. “They should research on immigrants that pose a huge threat the country.”
Even as views of Trump’s second-term immigration platform have soured, support for specific policies can vary depending on how they’re described. In CNN’s poll, 16% of Americans who said they were opposed to increasing the budget for ICE also said, in a separate question, that they viewed the increase in spending on “border security, enforcement of immigration laws and detention of those charged with entering the country illegally” as a reason to support Trump’s recently passed spending bill.
There’s also relatively muted opposition to punitive ideas Trump has advanced against those who do have criminal records regardless of their current citizenship status. Americans are closely split on whether they’d favor or oppose Trump carrying out threats to send US citizens convicted of violent crimes to detention in a foreign country (37% would support this, with 39% opposed and the rest offering neither opinion). And there’s narrow support, 43% to 35%, for efforts to prioritize revoking US citizenship from naturalized citizens convicted of certain crimes — the only positive reading on any policy tested.
By contrast, Americans overwhelmingly say, 71% to 12%, they’d oppose Trump acting on his threats to deport high-profile critics of the administration’s policies, even if they live in the US legally and have not been convicted of any crimes.
Immigration becomes a top issue for Democrats
Asked in the same survey to name the issue they consider most important, 20% of Americans mention immigration, ranking it second only to economic concerns.
While that’s similar overall to January, the partisan dynamics of the issue have shifted somewhat. At the start of the year, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were 26 points likelier than those aligned with the Democratic Party to mention immigration. Now, while it’s still a more potent issue among Republicans than Democrats, that gap has narrowed to 10 points amid the rising Democratic opposition to Trump’s deportation policies.
The poll also finds more support than backlash for protests against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Americans say, 55% to 45%, that the protests of the Trump administration’s deportation policies have been mostly justified. And by a 9-point margin, 47% to 38%, they say they’re more concerned that the government will go too far in cracking down on protests rather than fearing that the protests themselves will get out of hand.
There’s particularly strong backing for the protests among Democratic-aligned adults (78% of whom call them justified), adults younger than 35 (63%), and people of color (59%).
Most Americans, 59%, say they oppose Trump using National Guard troops, who are typically controlled by state governors, in response to immigration protests even if a state’s governor does not support the use of those troops.
The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS from July 10-13 among a random national sample of 1,057 US adults drawn from a probability-based panel. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results among all adults have a margin of sampling error of ±3.5 percentage points.
CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta and Edward Wu contributed to this report.
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