Eric Levitz

Yeah, so when Trump came into office, he had public opinion at his back, really, for at least many aspects of his immigration program.

In November 2024, a CBS News YouGov poll found that 57% of Americans supported, quote, "...a national program to find and deport all immigrants who are in the U.S.

illegally."

And 73% said that the next president should make deportations of some kind one of his top priorities.

And so there was really this sense in the United States that something needed to be done to reestablish security at the border.

And so Trump really had a mandate to do something on immigration.

It's really pretty incredible what a turnaround Trump has managed to engineer.

As of last month, Trump's approval on immigration was underwater by about 12 points.

Americans now disapprove of his deportation program by 8 points and say ICE is making communities less safe rather than more safe by 21 points.

— You know, not long ago, Abolish ICE was one of the most politically toxic propositions in American politics.

— Yes, yes.

— And in January, a YouGov poll found 46 percent of voters, including one-fifth of Republicans, saying that they supported that concept.

You know, a lot of this polling was done right in the aftermath of the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Bredy.

And so I think maybe it might be hard to overstate how much of an influence the spectacle of armed agents of the state seeming to unnecessarily execute U.S.

citizens have had on public opinion.

The bottom line is the administration has gone out of its way in both its messaging and in practice to make its approach to mass deportation as extreme, disruptive, and polarizing as possible.

Yeah, I think that that's definitely a significant part of it.

I think that the generic proposition, should people who are in the country illegally be deported, often gets majority support because, you know, there's a basic intuition, you break the law and so you should be removed.

But then there is, you know, competing laws.

Intuitions where if you describe, okay, somebody that's been here for a long time, follows the law, works hard, is a pillar of their community, should that person be thrown out of the country?