Trump’s migrant roundups have a crucial ally: Public opinion

Until recently, Suzanne Pasquino couldn’t think of anything she and President Donald Trump agreed on.

But the registered Democrat, who voted against Trump in November, concedes it was hard for her to take issue with the images she saw over the weekend of Venezuelan migrants and alleged gang members being deported from the United States and marched into a notorious Salvadoran prison, heads shaved and knees bent in submission.

“With immigration, I tend to be empathetic,” said Pasquino, a 63-year-old from Bloomfield, New Jersey, who works as a grocery store cashier and listened to the arguments against deportation on TV over the weekend. “At some point you’ve got to be like, ‘We’ve got this issue. Trump’s handling it.’ And with my Democratic Party, yes, we’re empathetic, but we kind of went too much in the other direction.”

The Trump administration is embroiled in legal and political controversy over a trio of deportation flights to El Salvador last weekend, with legal commentators arguing that he is misusing a law called the Alien Enemies Act and depriving deportees of their right to due process.

Trump has said the flights included violent members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and the Salvadoran MS-13. The White House won’t say how it determined that designation, and it has said some of the deportees did not have criminal records and have not been charged with any crimes.

But the president has a key ally in the matter: public opinion. Most Americans say they are in favor of deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, violent or not. Even some who didn’t vote for Trump or embrace his agenda have found it difficult to argue against the notion of rounding up and deporting migrants whom Trump has described as criminals associated with violent gangs.

And some support the roundups if they swept up whose only known crime was entering the U.S. illegally.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll in February found 89% support for deporting undocumented immigrants accused of violent crimes, while 62% said the same for those accused of nonviolent crimes such as shoplifting.

According to a Washington Post average of polls from the past month, 51% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration — marks that may reflect the popularity of mass deportations in general. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll in February likewise found that 51% of Americans supported trying to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to live in the U.S.

Scott Heilbrunn, 68, voted for Trump in November after supporting Joe Biden four years earlier, concluding that the latter’s presidency was a “disappointment.” Heilbrunn doesn’t believe it’s remotely realistic for Trump to deport all 11 million. But his handling of immigration so far is “terrific,” Heilbrunn said.

“We’re not ideologues one way or the other,” Heilbrunn said, speaking for his household outside Baltimore. “But we’re supportive of our family. We want safety, we want to be able to work hard, we want to be able to keep what we earn.”

The White House has declined to make the deportees’ identities public, so virtually nothing is known about their backgrounds or criminal histories. Heilbrunn, like others, said there is likely little political cost if they all came into the country illegally.

“Except for in California and New York, I don’t think anybody is shedding any tears for these people being sent to El Salvador,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a winning issue for the left.”

Trump’s team agrees, seeing little political downside to emphasizing the deportations, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy. Amid rising prices and the economic turmoil of Trump’s tariff strategy, Trump’s White House advisers are thrilled that the focus at the moment is largely back on immigration, the issue Trump embraced above any other on the campaign trail, the official said.

David Larson, who splits his time between Fort Myers, Florida, and outside Minneapolis, didn’t vote for Trump but fully supports removing undocumented migrants who have committed crimes “by whatever means,” he said.

It gives him no pause, he added, that some of the men rounded up by immigration officials over the weekend may not have been in a gang or committed a violent offense.

“He’s going full speed ahead, which, there is something to be said about that,” Larson said. “There’s a lot of times in Washington things just get bogged down, and people keep talking, talking, talking, and nothing happens.”

Larson said he hasn’t been able to convince himself to vote for Trump in the past three elections, voting Libertarian each time instead.

“I just have never liked the guy,” said Larson, 69. But he believes “both sides have become too extreme” on immigration. He supports legal status for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents and also wants to see legislation establishing a pathway to citizenship for some of those people.

Trump became the first president to invoke the Alien Enemies Act since World War II, using the law to arrest and deport people without a court hearing who the White House says are gang members. The flights landed in El Salvador after a U.S. district judge had ordered the planes to return. As a result, the legality of the process is under review.

The president and his allies have attacked the people scrutinizing their actions, including Judge James E. Boasberg. Trump has said Boasberg is a “left wing lunatic” who should be impeached, prompting Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to issue a rare rebuke criticizing the president’s rhetoric against judges. Trump and his officials have insisted they are complying with the law.

The administration has said in court filings that some of the people deported over the weekend do not have criminal records in the U.S. Several family members have come forward and said their loved ones were wrongly wrapped up in the initiative and faced an uncertain fate in a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights abuses.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not detail any specific charges or release deportees’ names out of “privacy concerns.” Instead, she said she “can assure the American people” that government agents have the right people and were certain of “the threat that they pose to our homeland.”

Some voters said the Trump administration should be more transparent about its process, however.

Jiang Tian, a professor at Ohio State University who voted for Kamala Harris, said he believes that immigrants in the U.S. illegally who commit crimes should be deported. Tian, 45, went through a long and demanding process to become a citizen in 2015, after coming to the U.S. from China years earlier.

But he thinks Trump is moving recklessly with his mass deportation initiative.

“I like that he tightened the border,” Tian said. “But the deportation process, it seems like they’re trying to do too much in too little time. It’s a mess.

“Do they have enough evidence? Is there a legal process? They need to justify their actions.”

Dani Tolani, 23, of New Albany, Ohio, suggested that Trump’s deportation program will inevitably include immigrants who have committed no other crimes since entering the country illegally.

“The words he’s been using, on a base level, they sound good. Wanting to get people who are causing crime in the country to go, that’s a good thing in theory,” said Tolani, who also supported Harris. “A lot of the people he’s taking out aren’t criminals. They’re just people who haven’t gotten their legal status in America.”

Last year, Democrats accused Trump of sinking a bipartisan immigration bill that would have represented the first significant progress on the issue in years — all so he could run on the issue in November. Trump repeatedly criticized and mischaracterized the bill and stressed that the best way to fix the immigration issue was to elect him president.

Trump still faces political risks, said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. Clear majorities oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, parents of children who are U.S. citizens and people who have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years.

“There’s overwhelming support for deporting any illegal immigrant who has committed a crime, particularly a violent crime. That’s a no-brainer,” Ayres said. “But when you drill down, there’s overwhelming opposition to deporting illegal immigrants who have been here a number of years and never committed a crime or who arrived here as children or who have U.S. citizen children.”

Pasquino, the cashier from New Jersey, said that nuance reflects her worldview. In one of her past jobs, she worked with immigrant students, including many who had been brought to the U.S. as small children, and she sympathized with their plight. That soft spot does not extend to undocumented immigrant gang members, she said.

Pasquino was hesitant to give Trump a pass on other issues, especially ones that hit closer to home — and her bank account.

As a cashier, she chats every day with people about the rising price of eggs and other groceries. And she plans to retire in months, not years, and hopes her investments hold up.

“As much as Trump thinks he’s going to divert attention away from the economy, it’s not going to happen. I’m in the food business. I hear from the customers, ‘Oh the egg prices are so high,’” she said. “I’m 63. I can’t argue with the immigration stuff, but the economy is still on our minds. His decisions are screwing around with the stock markets, and as a soon-to-be retiree, my 401(k) is getting hit.”

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Scott Clement contributed to this report.