How Trump made “abolish ICE” go mainstream

When President Donald Trump launched his deportation campaign last January, he had the American public at his back.

Under Joe Biden, unauthorized border crossings had soared to record levels — and threw America into a nativist mood. In November 2024, a CBS News/YouGov poll found 57 percent of Americans expressing support for “a national program to find and deport all immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally,” while 73 percent said that the next president should make deportations a priority.

The Trump White House was happy to oblige. And during its first months in office, the public seemed pleased with its efforts. In early 2025, voters approved of Trump’s handling of immigration by as much as 12 points, while favoring his “program to deport immigrants illegally in the US” by 16.

Immigration was the foundation of Trump’s political strength — the issue where he consistently enjoyed the trust of a supermajority of Americans.

And he squandered it within a year.

Once, the phrase “Trump’s immigration policy” evoked images of order in the American imagination: a wall ringing the nation’s borders, migrant panhandlers and criminals airbrushed from city streets.

Today, those words conjure much different pictures — of masked paramilitaries pepper-spraying protesters, breaking into people’s homes, tearing parents from their crying children, and pumping bullets into American citizens.

Voters do not like what they see. Trump’s approval on immigration is now underwater by 12 points. Americans disapprove of his “deportation program” by 8 points and say ICE is making communities “less safe” rather than “more safe” by 21. Not long ago, “Abolish ICE” was among the most politically toxic propositions in American politics. Now, 46 percent of voters — including one-fifth of Republicans — support the idea, according to a recent YouGov poll.

Until this week, the White House evinced little concern for its immigration agenda’s collapsing support. When an ICE agent needlessly shot a 37-year-old mother to death in Minneapolis in early January, the Trump administration immediately rallied to the shooter’s defense. When Border Patrol agents were caught on video Saturday firing 10 bullets into the back of a protester, the Department of Homeland Security swiftly smeared the victim as a domestic terrorist, effectively asking Americans to trust its word over their lying eyes.

Even conservatives struggled to stomach that last act of depravity. The administration’s handling of Alex Pretti’s killing provoked rebukes from Republican senators, right-wing magazines, and the NRA.

Faced with a backlash so broad and overwhelming, Trump finally decided to change course, however minutely.

In recent days, he demoted his hardline Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, extended an olive branch to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, discussed Democratic demands for DHS reform with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and suggested that Pretti’s death would receive a thorough investigation (although, there are signs this may not actually be the case).

Given the scale of ICE and CPB’s lawlessness, it would be generous to call these half-measures. The administration still appears staunchly opposed to reforms that would actually ensure its deportation forces’ professionalism and legal accountability. It is still eager to use immigration policy as a tool for terrorizing ethnic minorities and punishing the administration’s political adversaries.

By indulging these radical impulses, Trump has achieved an extraordinary feat of political self-sabotage: He has managed to turn his greatest source of political vitality into a vulnerability — and done so despite successfully addressing the electorate’s chief complaint on that issue as of 2024.

Trump lost with a winning hand

The Biden-era surge in migration fueled widespread discontent.

Vast and sudden influxes of asylum-seekers — who were often both indigent and legally barred from employment — burdened many municipalities’ social services, increased visible homelessness, and sparked an array of fears and resentments in longtime US residents (not least, among those who had themselves immigrated in the recent past).

By the time Trump took office, however, the migrant wave had already crested.

This was partly due to America’s softening labor market. Border crossings had first started soaring in late 2020, as US employers expanded hiring and hiked wages to satisfy rebounding consumer demand. Faced with more tepid recoveries in their home countries, many migrants went north in search of opportunity.

By 2024, however, job growth in the US was slowing — and the American economy’s magnetic force was weakening. Illegal border crossings fell by 53 percent between December 2023 and May 2024.

The following month, Biden enacted various new restrictions on asylum, which helped reduce unauthorized migration by another 44 percent between June and November of 2024.

Biden and Kamala Harris derived little political benefit from this decline, likely because they were associated with the spike that had preceded it.

But Trump did not have that problem. His reputation for “toughness” on immigration was unquestioned.

And it served the new president in more ways than one: Upon his inauguration, unauthorized immigration immediately plunged to its lowest point on record. In February 2025, only 8,326 migrants crossed the US southern border, down from 47,300 in December 2024 — and 249,740 in December 2023.

In other words: Before Trump had changed virtually anything about immigration policy, the border crisis was effectively solved.

Given these conditions, little stood between Trump and political success on immigration. He could have done nothing and still credibly claimed to have secured the border. Had Trump pursued a normal, restrictionist agenda — higher spending on border enforcement, more deportations of (even low-level) criminal offenders, restrictions on opportunities for asylum — he likely would have appeased his base and swing voters alike.

The bizarre, self-defeating flamboyance of Trump’s radicalism

Granted, there is more to governance than maximizing your approval rating. The point of politics is not merely to gain power but to use it. Trump and his allies were not content to deter future immigration or deport undocumented criminals. They wanted to purge America of all undocumented immigrants — or at least, all those who did not work for their cronies in the hospitality and agricultural sectors.

Yet even this may undersell their ambitions. Some in the White House plainly wish to exile legal immigrants from certain countries, on the grounds that their ethnic groups corrode our nation’s culture and poison its blood.

Nevertheless, even from the standpoint of advancing its incendiary ideological goals, the administration’s approach to immigration enforcement appears self-undermining. After all, the White House hasn’t just pursued radical objectives, but made a big show of its own extremity and authoritarianism.

Perhaps, the administration’s immigration enforcement operations were motivated by racial animus rather than a desire to uphold the law. But it still would not have been wise to say as much: Trump would not have won the 2024 election without substantial support from both nonwhite and immigrant voters.

And yet Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has chosen to post on social media white nationalist slogans from its official social media accounts, while the president has derided all Somali-Americans as “low-IQ people.”

Meanwhile, it seems obvious that, if you want to limit backlash to intensive deportation operations, you must ensure that they burden US citizens as little as possible.

And yet, even as stories of ICE and CBP’s maltreatment of Americans piled up last year, the administration sought to reduce their legal accountability while loosening training standards.

This posture reached its apotheosis with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

In each of those cases, the administration had every incentive to proceed cautiously. Video evidence of both shootings indicated that — at the very least — they may have been illegitimate.

And if its deportation forces had in fact lawlessly executed an American citizen, the White House would be ill-advised to take ownership of such violence.

The administration could have responded to each killing with expressions of sorrow and calls for investigation. It might have even declared the killers a few bad apples, whose recklessness undermined ICE’s fundamental mission: to keep Americans safe.

Instead, it chose to immediately defend the killer and defame the victim — by telling lies blatantly contradicted by video evidence.

The White House’s commitment to this messaging strategy was as strategically puzzling as it was morally odious. In the weeks following Good’s killing, polling revealed that a supermajority of Americans had not bought the White House’s line. Disapproval of ICE shot up past 60 percent.

Nevertheless, when Border Patrol fired 10 bullets into Pretti’s prone body, the administration sang an even shriller rendition of the same tune.

America still favors Republicans on immigration

Given all this, it is remarkable — and disconcerting — that Trump’s standing on immigration is not even worse.

Immigration remains the president’s best issue. According to the progressive data journalist G. Elliott Morris’s poll tracker, Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration by 9 points — while disapproving of his handling of inflation by 26. Trump’s marks on all other major issues fall between those two poles.

More troublingly, the GOP seems to have retained an advantage on immigration. In a Wall Street Journal poll taken after Good’s killing, voters said that the Republican Party was “better equipped” to handle immigration than the Democrats by an 11-point margin.

Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.

Nevertheless, Trump’s unabashed extremism has made the Democratic Party’s vulnerabilities on border security less salient. As the public has soured on the president’s immigration agenda, the Democrats’ lead in 2026 midterm polling has grown from a measly 0.2 points last April to 5.5 points today.

Trump could have embraced a center-right immigration agenda and coasted to political success on the issue. Or he could have pursued Stephen Miller’s radical plans for America’s ethnic purification with a modicum of stealth and message discipline. Instead, his administration has behaved as though only Truth Social users have voting rights.