Trump's Immigration Triumph Became His Political Disaster

57 percent of Americans supported mass deportations when Donald Trump took office in January 2025. Today, that same policy is underwater by 8 points. How did the president manage to lose public support on his signature issue—even while achieving unprecedented success at the border?

The answer reveals one of the most spectacular cases of political self-sabotage in recent memory.

The Foundation That Crumbled

When Trump launched his deportation campaign, he had every advantage. Unauthorized border crossings under Joe Biden had reached record highs, throwing America into what can only be described as a nativist mood. A CBS News/YouGov poll from November 2024 showed 73 percent of Americans wanted the next president to prioritize deportations.

The new administration delivered—perhaps too well. By February 2025, only 8,326 migrants crossed the southern border, down from 47,300 in December 2024 and a staggering 249,740 in December 2023. Before Trump had changed virtually anything about immigration policy, the border crisis was effectively solved.

This should have been a political goldmine. Immigration had been Trump's strongest issue, where he consistently enjoyed supermajority trust from Americans. Early polling reflected this: voters approved of his immigration handling by 12 points and favored his deportation program by 16 points.

But something went catastrophically wrong.

When Success Breeds Failure

The phrase "Trump's immigration policy" once evoked images of order—a wall, safer streets, controlled borders. Today, it conjures something entirely different: masked paramilitaries breaking into homes, parents torn from crying children, and bullets pumping into American citizens.

The transformation began with the administration's response to controversial killings. When an ICE agent shot 37-year-old Renee Good to death in Minneapolis, the White House immediately defended the shooter. When Border Patrol agents fired 10 bullets into protester Alex Pretti's back, the Department of Homeland Security branded the victim a domestic terrorist—asking Americans to trust their word over video evidence.

Even conservatives couldn't stomach this approach. Republican senators, right-wing magazines, and the NRA rebuked the administration's handling of Pretti's killing. The backlash was so overwhelming that Trump finally began making minor course corrections, demoting hardline Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and extending olive branches to critics.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The political damage is measurable and stark. Trump's immigration approval has flipped from +12 to -12 in less than a year. Americans now say ICE makes communities "less safe" rather than "more safe" by 21 points. Most remarkably, 46 percent of voters—including one-fifth of Republicans—now support abolishing ICE, an idea that was political poison just months ago.

Yet here's the paradox: immigration remains Trump's best issue. While Americans disapprove of his immigration handling by 9 points, they disapprove of his inflation management by 26 points. Republicans still hold an 11-point advantage over Democrats on immigration in recent polling.

This suggests something profound about American political preferences: apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.

The Strategic Puzzle

From a purely tactical standpoint, the administration's approach defies explanation. Trump won the 2024 election with substantial support from nonwhite and immigrant voters. Yet his Department of Homeland Security has posted white nationalist slogans on official social media accounts, while the president has derided Somali-Americans as "low-IQ people."

If you want to limit backlash to intensive deportation operations, you ensure they burden US citizens as little as possible. Instead, even as stories of ICE and CBP maltreatment of Americans mounted, the administration reduced legal accountability while loosening training standards.

The administration could have responded to controversial killings with expressions of sorrow and calls for investigation. It might have declared bad actors as rogue elements undermining ICE's mission to keep Americans safe. Instead, it chose immediate defense of killers and defamation of victims—with lies contradicted by video evidence.