Trump’s Deportation Ploy Blows Up in His Face

Politics admin August 19, 2026 0 Comments

The Trump administration’s push to keep ICE out of the headlines before the midterms does not appear to have convinced voters, with half of Americans saying its immigration crackdown is still too aggressive.

After the White House faced bipartisan backlash over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents earlier this year, President Donald Trump ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, pledged to make the White House’s mass deportation campaign more discreet, including by making fewer arrests in public. He also threw Noem under the bus by publicly calling her signature billion-dollar warehouse crusade a mistake in humiliating testimony.

But with less than three months until the midterm elections, a Politico poll published Wednesday suggests the makeover has failed to shift public opinion.

Half of Americans, including nearly a quarter of Trump’s 2024 voters, still say the 80-year-old president’s immigration campaign is too aggressive, according to Politico. That figure is “virtually unchanged” from polling in January and April, when outrage mounted over federal agents killing U.S. citizens Renee Good, 37, and Alex Pretti, 37.

Non-MAGA Trump voters are more than twice as likely as self-identified MAGA voters to believe that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has gone too far, with 31 percent describing it as too aggressive compared with 15 percent of MAGA voters, according to the poll conducted from Aug. 8 to Aug. 12.

The findings point to a potential vulnerability for Republicans heading into the November midterms on an issue that has traditionally been a source of strength for the party.

“Voters really did want border security, but they did not want to see abuelita taken away because she’s been here for 40 years but without documentation,” Arizona-based GOP strategist Barrett Marson told Politico.

The poll, conducted by London-based polling firm Public First, found a notable proportion of Americans have noticed the administration’s attempts to change course. But those changes have done little to improve trust.

A 56 percent majority of Americans say there has been at least a “small shift” in how ICE is carrying out its immigration crackdown. But 44 percent of those respondents say the changes have made no difference in how much they trust the administration, while 30 percent say they have made them less willing to trust officials on immigration.

Whit Ayres, a Washington-based Republican pollster, told Politico that the stubborn public opposition is “not that surprising at all.”

Even with a lower-profile approach, the administration is still pushing to ramp up arrest and deportation numbers.

“It’s a lot easier just to go into an airport and find somebody who had overstayed a visa, had applied for an extension … and throw them into handcuffs and put them in a detention center. That’s the easy way to get the numbers up, and a great way to thoroughly antagonize public opinion,” he said.

Another Republican strategist, who spoke with Politico on the condition of anonymity, said Trump “ran on border security, and he’s following through.”

“But the visuals of wins are unfortunately overshadowed by the visuals of chaos,” they said. “There’s no question that the wall-to-wall coverage of the chaos that follows ICE makes voters squeamish.”

When contacted for comment, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Daily Beast that “Americans sent President Trump back to the White House with a clear mandate to deport criminal illegal aliens.”

“Every single day the Trump Administration is delivering on his promise to the American people to remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, and gang members from American communities,” she added. “Americans are grateful to the President for removing these criminals from their neighborhoods and for Making America Safe Again.”

ICE raids during Trump’s second term in the White House drew headlines for sparking protests nationwide. The aggressive enforcement campaign has also put pressure on the agents tasked with carrying it out.

John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director, told Politico in an interview published last fall that ICE agents were “under tremendous pressure.”

“They’ve been under a lot of pressure to ratchet up the number of arrests. They’ve been forced to adopt some of these more aggressive tactics, because the [Trump] administration seems more interested in the quantity of people arrested, more so than the quality,” said Sandweg.

Reuters reported in July that at least seven people have been killed in immigration enforcement operations since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, while 53 people have died in ICE custody since the president’s second term began.