Americans feel Trump has gone too far with mass deportations, new polls find

Independent

5 days ago

If President Donald Trump had his way, the press would stop talking about his administration's handling of files related to his former friend, the late pedophile and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Rather, he'd wish that they would talk about his 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' or his policies related to immigration.
But a series of new polls show that Americans do not approve of at least one of those core policies — Trump's efforts to deport swaths of immigrants from the country.
CBS News released a survey on Sunday that showed 51 percent of Americans think the Trump administration is focused too much on deporting immigrants who are in the United States illegally. The same number of Americans also disapprove of Trump's program to find and deport migrants in the country illegally.
The poll surveyed 2,343 adults in the United States between July 16 and July 18, with a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
In addition to those bad numbers on immigration, a slight majority of 52 percent said that the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than they thought it would, and 56 percent of U.S. adults said that the administration is prioritizing deporting people who are not dangerous criminals.
And a whopping 64 percent of Americans say that Hispanic people in the United States are subject to immigration and deportation searches from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as other races and ethnicities.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump talked frequently about enacting a mass deportation program to remove immigrants unlawfully in the country. Shortly after winning the presidency, he said that the plan would have ' no price tag.'
His 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' would send $178 billion toward immigration enforcement and $30 billion to ICE specifically throughout the next decade. The White House also hopes to hire 10,000 new ICE agents to help with deportation.
But lest the Trump administration brush off this poll as an outlier or 'fake news,' a new poll from CNN conducted by SSRS showed similar results. This one surveyed 1,057 respondents between July 10 and July 13, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
That survey showed that 55 percent of Americans thought that the Trump administration had gone too far in deporting migrants living in the United States illegally, up from 45 percent in February. And a slight majority of Americans at 53 percent say that the efforts have not made the United States safer.
The shift in public opinion shows that Trump has lost what was once considered his biggest asset. In 2024, many voters elected Trump partially out of frustration at the Biden administration's seemingly lax approach to the influx of migrants at the US-Mexico border.
The fact Joe Biden tasked Kamala Harris with handling the 'root causes' of migrsation from Latin America saddled her the administration's least popular policy. And even ancestrally Democratic and majority-Hispanic counties along the US-Mexico border such as the Rio Grande Valley in Texas revolted and voted for Republicans, sometimes for the first time in decades.
But many Americans have not taken too kindly to the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants.
In response to protests of ICE raids in Los Angeles, the Trump administration deployed the National Guard without the consent of the governor, which 59 percent of Americans oppose.
Americans also seem to support protests against the administration, with 55 percent of them calling protests against the administration's deportation policies are justified. In terms of what concerns them, 47 percent of Americans are more worried about the government going too far in cracking down on protests, compared with 38 percent who fear the protests will get out of control.
And Americans don't seem to like the specifics of Trump's anti-immigration policies, with 53 percent of respondents opposing increasing the budget for ICE by billions of dollars, 59 percent opposing an attempt to end birthright citizenship, 57 percent opposing building new detention facilities to detain up to 100,000 undocumented immigrants.
Trump's dropping numbers on immigration are a warning sign going into the 2026 midterms, especially considering that many Americans already disapprove of his across-the-board reciprocal tariffs and Americans who have heard of it disapprove of the massive cuts to social safety nets in the One Big, Beautiful Bill. This nosedive could easily signal trouble for him as he seeks to accomplish what has long been a goal of right-wing ideologues for whom Trump has been the ideal vessel.