When President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, many American voters wanted immigration reduced, and Trump quickly complied. He boosted funding for immigration enforcement, opened new detention centers, and pushed more Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as Customs and Border Patrol troops, into US cities.
While American disapproval of immigration was key to Trump winning two presidential elections, polls today show a growing divide.
Gallup found 30 percent of Americans want immigration decreased, which is down from 55 percent a year ago. In a New York Times/Siena national poll, a majority of voters still disapproved of immigration but also said Trump’s actions on enforcement have gone too far.
According to immigration reporter Molly O’Toole, the shift is a response to Trump’s oversimplified message that “all immigration is bad.” She said it was a successful message with no effective counterbalancing force until people saw firsthand Trump’s deportation tactics.
Speaking with Today, Explained fill-in host Astead Herndon, O’Toole explained why capturing voter sentiment on immigration often misses nuance, and why it may not deter the president’s push for faster and more extreme methods of arrests.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Recently, I’ve been curious about how the public is reacting to Trump’s immigration raids. Because, on the one hand, he promised all this, and you could argue voters knew what they were signing up for. But now that they’re seeing it in real life, are they having buyer’s remorse?
What Trump has done very effectively is shift the American public’s perception on immigration to the right. If you look at the polling, there actually is much more bipartisan support for immigration and broadly positive views on immigration writ large than you would think based on the rhetoric that we’ve heard and the electoral successes.
Instead of a conversation where illegal immigration is “bad” but refugees, asylum seekers, and other forms of legal immigration are “good” — which is how the debate broke down in the pre-Trump era — now, you just have “all immigration is bad.” And, in that way, I think the Trump administration has been remarkably effective at shifting the nature of the conversation.
That speaks to something that Democrats have done over the last several years, which is to kind of agree with Trump’s premise rather than offering their own affirmative vision. Is that how you have seen it?
Exactly. Trump has a strategy here, and it has been effective. But it’s easier to shift the whole conversation to one side of the spectrum if there is no counterbalance from the other side.
Some recent polls have found that, while voters want mostly immigrants who come to this country illegally to be deported, they don’t necessarily like the way the administration is doing it. It’s kind of weird, right? Voters want deportations, but not like this.
This gets into the complexity of the issue and the fact that political messaging is not a useful tool for communicating something this complicated. Because Trump shifted this conversation to “all immigration bad,” the American voter was not thinking, “Well, wait. Actually, a lot of these actions are targeting people who have permission to be here. They’re asylum seekers. They’re not these scary sort of criminals that the Trump campaign was talking about.”
There was a Gallup poll this summer that really drove this home for me. In 2024, 55 percent of people wanted to reduce all immigration, which I think is helpful to understand what was fueling Donald Trump’s comeback. But this year, the same poll found that number had dropped by almost half; just 30 percent of people wanted to reduce all immigration. It seems as if now that Donald Trump is there, maybe the sentiment or the public effort has at least swung back to the other side.
I think that poll is absolutely fascinating, but it’s really hard to know what to attribute it to. It’s hard to know to what extent that shift — which is a really quite dramatic shift sort of back towards a pre-2021 feeling on immigration — is because people feel like, “Okay, Trump ‘fixed’ the border.” Or does it have to do with people seeing what those promises look like in practice and being like, “Wait a second, I didn’t vote for that”?
It seems the White House is still pushing forward with deportations, even though there seems to be growing evidence that the public is liking what it’s seeing less and less. Under the normal rules of politics, isn’t that a bad thing to do? Why do we think the Trump administration seems completely removed from that more traditional form of political calculus?
I do think that the Trump administration has very effectively used the media to suck up all the oxygen in the room as a way to really magnify their sort of messaging. The Trump administration doesn’t really care what the media says about their message; they just want that message to get out. I think that what we saw in 2016 — and I think what we saw in 2024 — is you can have a very impassioned vocal minority that can win an election, even if what they support is not necessarily what a majority of the American public supports.
And so, I think the messaging, even though it seems counterintuitive, that’s who it’s for. It’s for their diehard supporters. Then, I think there’s another level, which is: They want people to be afraid, to “self-deport.”
The point is the intimidation.
Not just of immigrant communities; they want people to be afraid to protest. They want people to be afraid to come out. But I think time will tell also whether it turns enough people off that it becomes a less effective political strategy.
