Deportations Dominate Trump's First Week in Office

But the rightward shift on immigration in the U.S. was entirely preventable.

In the first week of his second term in office, President Donald Trump pursued the very immigration policies he clearly and openly promoted on the campaign trail. He’s clearly more emboldened in round two of his presidency and the seismic shift in public opinion on mass deportation likely has a lot to do with it.

This was entirely predictable, and it’s likely the catalyst of this swing in public opinion has a lot to do with the deny and downplay tactics deployed by the Democratic party over the last several years.

Several polls recently found that that a majority of Americans favor mass deportation.

Recently, CNN’s Harry Enten unveiled four separate polls that all found that most Americans support Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Marquette’s results were the most pronounced, with a whopping 64 percent of respondents saying they want to deport all illegal immigrants. The New York Times had a smaller share of respondents favoring mass deportation, though still a majority at 55 percent.

“There’s real uniformity here,” said Enten. “What you’re seeing essentially here is very clear indication that a majority of Americans…do, in fact, want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally. There’s no arguing with these numbers because they’re all essentially the same across four different pollsters.”

Only 36% of Americans were on board with mass deportation as Donald Trump was running for his first term in office.

Things were very different eight years ago. Right before Trump took office for his first term, ABC News found that only 36 percent of Americans backed the idea of mass deporting undocumented immigrants. But ABC’s pollsters revealed a 20 point swing in public sentiment in 2024. Now, 56 percent of their respondents favor mass deportation. How public opinion swung so severely isn’t a mystery to me.