More than half of voters support Trump’s promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants

Donald Trump’s plan to mount the “largest deportation effort in American history” has more support than one might think. Specifically, 54% of voters back the Republican candidate’s star policy, according to a Scripps News/Ipsos poll published Wednesday. By party affiliation, 86% of Republicans favor the measure, along with a quarter of Democrats. And while the poll shows that a higher percentage of voters have a more favorable opinion of Kamala Harris than Trump, 44% of them are confident that the former president would do a better job of handling the issue of immigration than the vice president (at 34%).

In line with several previous polls, the Scripps News/Ipsos survey places immigration among voters’ top three concerns heading into the November 5 vote: 39% cite it as one of the most important issues facing the country, second only to inflation, which tops the list at 57%. Securing the country’s southern border with Mexico was identified as the country’s top immigration priority.

As for which restrictive immigration policies they would like to see implemented, 69% support limiting the number of immigrants who can apply for asylum, as the Joe Biden administration has done since last June. In addition, 62% agree that local law enforcement should be able to detain immigrants, a power reserved for the federal government but which several conservative states — most notably Texas, but also Louisiana and Iowa — have tried to take over with laws that make irregular immigration a crime and allow local police to arrest and detain people suspected of being undocumented.

In third place is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants: 54% said they “strongly” or “somewhat” supported this proposal, a central part of the Republican Party’s immigration policy. Trump has been promising for months that he will expel 11 million people from the country, but has not specified how, when or whom he would deport, beyond assuring that he would use the military and law enforcement to do so. Without offering any other details, the candidate recently said the deportations would begin in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado. In recent weeks, Trump and his campaign have disseminated lies about immigrants in these two locations, falsely accusing Springfield’s Haitian community of eating local pets and claiming that a Venezuelan criminal gang has taken over Aurora.

A Pew Research Center report released last June already showed an increase in voter support for a national effort to deport those who are undocumented: 37% of voters then favored the measure, up 11% from 2021. Notably, the Pew poll showed that about one in ten Democratic voters supported the policy, while the Scripps News/Ipsos poll reveals that percentage has now risen to 25%.

Nevertheless, a strong majority of voters — regardless of party affiliation — still support establishing a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, the so-called Dreamers, according to this poll, conducted between September 13 and 15 from a sample of 1,027 adults and with a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

Other concerns

With less than 50 days left until the election, 71% of voters are concerned about officials not accepting the election results, with 37% saying they are “very concerned” about it. Despite having been indicted twice for his efforts to reverse the 2020 election results, Trump continues to question the outcome of the vote four years ago, going so far as to say in the last presidential debate that there is “so much proof” that he won against Biden.

Additionally, 51% of all voters — and 82% of Republicans — are concerned about non-U.S. citizens voting in the upcoming elections. By law, non-citizens cannot vote in the United States. Yet, Trump has repeatedly claimed that there are undocumented immigrants in the country who are committing massive voter fraud.

Despite the fact that several experts have assured that no-citizen voting is very rare and, therefore, cannot influence the results of an election, the former president’s allies in Congress are trying to tie federal government funding to states requiring proof of citizenship when people register to vote. So far they have been unsuccessful in doing so, but Trump has already warned his party in Congress that they shouldn’t support “in any way, shape or form” any proposal to avoid a partial government shutdown on October 1 that does not address the alleged illegal voting by undocumented immigrants.

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