In 2024, Donald Trump won a 49.8 percent plurality of the popular vote. Many different kinds of voters pulled the lever for him for many different reasons, but he certainly made no secret of his desire to carry out mass deportations. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, delegates waved professionally printed signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.”
After seeing what those mass deportations look like in practice, though, there’s been a sea change in public opinion. There was a period early last year when immigration and border policy was the only issue where Trump’s poll numbers were above water. Since then, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has torn through American cities brutalizing people with abandon and impunity, Trump’s immigration policy has become less and less popular. By December 2025, the share of Americans expressing disapproval of the administration’s deportation actions had grown from 44 percent in March to 53 percent. And that was before ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot American citizen Renee Good three times in the face for trying to drive away.
The shooting of Good may be one of the best-documented murders in human history, with multiple videos from various angles painting a picture of what happened that isn’t seriously debatable. Polls show that only 28 percent of Americans believe the shooting was justified. Trump supporters may be tempted to blame liberal media bias, but the same polls show that the vast majority of respondents have seen video footage for themselves. The first polls after the killing show it dealt a major blow to ICE’s already declining favorability.
The Trump administration’s full-throated defense of Ross has had the predictable effect of emboldening ICE agents to engage in ever more thuggish behavior on the ground. This, in turn, continues to generate a nonstop stream of horrifying footage and makes it implausible that the slide of public opinion against ICE will stop any time soon. This…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
