Trump Is Losing Political Ground on Immigration
Administration’s aggressive deportation push has alarmed voters, including some of the president’s supporters
June 20, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
The Trump administration’s aggressive deportation program is testing the political bounds of what Americans will tolerate, spurring a backlash from voters and some Republicans and testing the administration’s resolve.
Federal officials in recent weeks have stepped up raids on worksites and farms, seeking to fulfill President Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. The move has sparked alarm in immigrant communities and street protests in Los Angeles and other cities. Last weekend, Trump directed that arrests be paused at farms and hotels, only to reverse the directive days later.
The back-and-forth was a sign of the confusion and conflict within the administration, which faces pressure from businesses and some Republicans to dial back enforcement even as it is under pressure from the MAGA base to pick up the pace.
Republican members of Congress from California, Texas and Florida have publicly urged the White House to give priority to deportations of criminals rather than migrants who have resided in the U.S. for long periods and have otherwise obeyed the law. The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R., Pa.), called the farm raids “just wrong.” The co-founder of Latinas for Trump, Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, wrote on X that the administration’s actions were “unacceptable and inhumane” and “not what we voted for.”
“I may have voted for Trump, but I can’t stay silent about what’s happening with ICE in LA,” Ryan Garcia, a former interim lightweight boxing champion who endorsed Trump last year, wrote on X. “We can have borders without losing our humanity.”
Presidents of both parties have historically hesitated to pursue large-scale immigration enforcement in the country’s interior precisely because it tends to be politically unpopular. Trump’s push for deportations far from the border has begun to trigger a backlash in public opinion, with polls showing his approval rating on immigration and deportations—formerly one of his strongest issues—has now turned negative.
A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found that just 43% approved of Trump’s performance on immigration while 54% disapproved. On deportations, 40% approved while 56% disapproved. In the polling average maintained by the analyst Nate Silver, Trump’s immigration policies were popular on a net basis until earlier this month—but are now more unpopular than popular by a 3-point margin. Trump is still viewed more positively on immigration than on the economy and trade.
On Thursday, Trump blasted a Fox News poll showing that 53% of voters disapproved of his handling of immigration, posting on his social-media platform: “They are always wrong and negative. It’s why MAGA HATES FoxNews.” (Fox News’s parent, Fox Corp., and The Wall Street Journal’s parent, News Corp, share common ownership.)
People are reacting to the way Trump’s immigration policies have played out, and they don’t like what they see, said Democratic pollster Molly Murphy. “A majority support the policies, a majority oppose the enforcement,” she said. People like the idea of tightening the border and cracking down on illegal immigration, but they view the administration’s conduct as capricious and unfair, she said.
“Trump’s muscularity on immigration has always been a source of strength, but pulling people out of their homes and workplaces and schools seems cruel,” she said. In her surveys, Americans by a 40-point margin oppose deporting people without due process or in violation of a court order and conducting raids at churches, schools and hospitals.
At the same time, some of his most ardent supporters are urging the president to continue aggressive enforcement. “If they’re looking to achieve the deportation numbers that they campaigned on, that the White House says they want, there’s still a lot of work to do to get to that point,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, which calls for deporting all migrants in the country illegally. “I’m hopeful they will ramp up deportations and keep it going even when they start to lose some public support,” he said.
The problem, experts say, is that the millions of deportations Trump has repeatedly promised can only be achieved by targeting migrants who have resided in the U.S. illegally for a long time but haven’t broken other laws and have become integrated into society, as opposed to criminals or those apprehended shortly after an illegal border crossing.
“We are witnessing a level of interior immigration enforcement the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, who opposes the administration’s policies. “Nobody likes border chaos, and that was a big reason voters supported Donald Trump in 2024. But interior enforcement is much less popular than border enforcement because it’s socially and economically disruptive.”
A decade ago this week, Trump famously descended the Trump Tower escalator to announce his presidential campaign with a vivid invocation of the murderers and rapists he said were pouring across the nation’s southern border. His rhetoric over the intervening years has succeeded in reframing the issue in the public mind, turning what was once viewed as largely an economic debate into a representation of voters’ concerns about crime, disorder and cultural change.
The Biden administration’s liberalization of some border and asylum policies and the flood of migrants that ensued were broadly unpopular, helping build support for Trump’s 2024 election comeback. During the campaign, Trump opposed a bipartisan legislative effort to tighten border policies and falsely claimed refugees were eating people’s pets in Ohio. Majorities in polls expressed support for “mass deportations”—a phrase that was printed on signs waved at the Republican National Convention.
But in practice, the administration’s approach to the issue has struck many as both erratic and extreme, with high-profile examples of foreign students having their visas revoked, migrants deported in error or without due process, foreign tourists held for questioning, and even some U.S. citizens detained.
Trump-supporting podcaster Joe Rogan deplored the administration’s actions on a recent broadcast, saying, “If you got here, and you’ve integrated, maybe you shouldn’t have snuck in. But you did it, and now you’re not breaking any laws, and you’re a hardworking person—those people need a path to citizenship, man.”
The administration is now at an inflection point, with deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller leading the hard-liners pushing for more deportations even as the president himself sends mixed messages. In the space of a day last week, Trump expressed sympathy for “our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business” who “have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them”—only to post a few hours later that he was committed to stanching the “tsunami of Illegals.”
“I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
Back in 2012, then-private citizen Donald Trump was singing a different tune. He had a theory about why the Republicans had just lost another presidential election: Mitt Romney, the nominee that year, had alienated Latino voters by endorsing “a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” and as a result had “lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@wsj.com