Surprising Takeaways from Latest Immigration Polling

A new month brings fresh polling on the president’s overall performance and voters’ impressions of his immigration policies. ICE enforcement has been in the news a lot lately, but have images of ICE officers squaring off against protestors in cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago soured Americans views on deportations? You may be surprised, because while immigration enforcement isn’t always pretty, it’s still – notwithstanding recent media reports, many inflammatory and tendentious – popular. 

CBS News Poll

On November 2, CBS News released the results of a poll conducted by opinion outfit YouGov. That poll involved 2,124 adults – not registered voters, let alone likely ones—surveyed between October 29 and 31, with a margin of error of +/- 2.6 points. 

In that poll, 41 percent of respondents approved of the job Trump is doing as president, and 59 percent disapproved—meaning Trump is 18 points in the red when it comes to his overall approval. 

That said, in the same CBS News/YouGov poll conducted at the beginning of October, Trump’s approval/ disapproval stood at 42/58—a 16-point deficit for the incumbent, but a 2-point difference between the two polls that’s well within the margin of error.

In other words, not much changed approval-wise for the president in October, even as the government shutdown has continued and ICE (and CBP) enforcement has preceded apace.

Which brings me to the views of U.S. adults on the president’s immigration performance. In the latest poll, 45 percent of those surveyed approved of Trump’s handling of the subject, compared to 55 percent who disapproved. 

Those results that are unchanged from the earlier CBS News/YouGov poll, even as the network has highlighted confrontations between immigration enforcement officers and residents of (and Democratic politicians in) the Windy City with captions like “Immigration and crime crackdown heightens tensions in Chicago area” (October 9), “Protesters clash with immigration agents in Chicago” (October 15) and “ICE says they’re conducting targeted raids in Chicago, but actions and reasons remain opaque” (October 29). 

This response is particularly interesting because when respondents were given five different subject areas (including “government spending” and “DEI”) and asked which was “most important to how [they] judge the Trump administration so far”, 30 percent said “immigration and border policies”, second only to “economy and inflation policies” (43 percent) in terms of importance.

Of course, judging the Trump administration based on immigration and border policies could either mean respondents wanted more enforcement in those areas or less. My guess is this particular 30 percent wants more. 

That would explain both why Trump’s immigration approval rating has remained static even given CBS News’s own reporting and why Trump’s 45 percent approval on the subject is his best rating in that poll, outpacing inflation (34 percent approval) and “the economy” (38 percent approval). 

The most surprising response in the latest CBS News/YouGov poll, though, came in response to question 20: “Do you think Donald Trump’s policies are making the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border go up, go down, or not change?”

In response, 65 percent said “go down”, which is objectively correct given Border Patrol’s Southwest border migrant apprehensions under Trump are at their lowest level since the 1970s.

The “surprise” is the 6 percent of respondents who believe Trump’s border policies have caused illegal entries to “go up”, and the 29 percent who think they’ve had no impact—combined 35 percent or more than a third of adults. 

My job is to focus on what’s happening at the border, but I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that most of my fellow Americans had at least a passing idea of how much more secure things had become there over the past nine months. Or maybe I need to watch more network news to better capture the zeitgeist. 

NewsNation/DecisionDesk HQ Poll

CBS News wasn’t the only outlet to drop polling results over the weekend; on November 2, NewsNation released the findings from a poll it conducted with DecisionDesk HQ.

That poll surveyed 1,159 Americans (again, not voters per se) between October 27 and 29, and it has a margin of error of +/- 2.9 percentage points. 

Trump did a little better on his overall performance in that poll, with 43 percent of respondents either “strongly” approving of the job he’s doing (28 percent) or “somewhat” approving (15 percent), compared to 56 percent who either somewhat disapproved (7 percent) or strongly disapproved (49 percent) of the incumbent’s handling of his job. 

“A little better”, but not much better compared to the CBS News/YouGov poll. 

The same is true when it comes to Trump’s handling of immigration policy, which 47 percent of those polled either strongly approved of (35 percent) or somewhat approved of (12 percent), and with which 52 percent disapproved either somewhat (8 percent) or strongly (44 percent). 

Plainly, most Americans have strongly held opinions about Trump and immigration. But then, fewer Americans than you might think have been surprised by how he’s handled the subject. 

When asked how they “rate President Trump’s handling of” immigration “so far”, 30 percent said that it was “much better” than they had expected, 11 percent “somewhat better than expected”, 13 percent “about what” they’d expected, 12 percent “somewhat worse than expected”, and 34 percent “much worse than expected”. 

Immigration was one of Trump’s leading issues heading into the 2024 presidential election, and this poll shows that 54 percent of U.S. adults are either pleasantly surprised by what he’s subsequently done or think he did what he said he’d do with respect to interior enforcement and border security. 

The other 46 percent apparently hoped the Republican challenger was just talking a big game last November when he promised a border shutdown and mass deportations but didn’t really mean it – or possibly they want even more enforcement than Trump has delivered.

Support for ICE Deportations

It could well be the latter, which brings me to the surprise response in the NewsNation/DecisionDesk HQ poll.

Respondents were asked: “Do you support or oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deporting immigrants who have entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas?” 

Note that the word “criminal” never appeared in that question. Despite that, 58 percent of those polled either strongly supported (38 percent) or somewhat supported (20 percent) such a plan. 

By contrast, just 39 percent of respondents either somewhat opposed (14 percent) to ICE removing aliens here illegally or were strongly opposed (25 percent) to such a scheme. 

That’s a 19-point gap in favor of enforcement, in a poll where just 42 percent of respondents described themselves as either “very conservative” (19 percent) or “somewhat conservative” (23 percent)—and 47 percent voted for Kamala Harris, compared to 45 percent who chose Trump.

Plainly, support for immigration enforcement is not solely the province of “right-wingers” and Trump true believers. 

And NewsNation is based in Chicago, ground zero for the president’s current ICE enforcement efforts, so it’s not like they soft-peddled the question. 

That said, perhaps this response shouldn’t be too much of a surprise given it correlates with an October Harvard/Harris poll, in which 56 percent of respondents supported “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally” — not just criminal illegal aliens.

In fact, even in the CBS News/YouGov poll, 52 percent of those surveyed approved “of the Trump administration’s program to find and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally”. 

Contrast that with the 48 percent who disapprove of those policies, and you’ll see a majority still supports the Trump deportation plan, regardless of the images coming out of Chicago and elsewhere. 

Law enforcement isn’t always pretty, and that’s especially true when ICE agents are battling with often ill-informed and self-righteous protesters when they are doing it. But regardless, deportations are still popular with a majority of the American people.