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Oct 8, 2025  |  
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Jazmine Ulloa


NextImg:Voters Favor Deporting Those in U.S. Illegally, Poll Finds, but Say Trump Has Gone Too Far

Nine months into President Trump’s mass deportation campaign, registered voters largely support the idea of removing immigrants who have arrived in the country illegally, even as majorities say they feel his methods have gone too far, according to the latest survey from The New York Times and Siena University.

Since Mr. Trump returned to power, his administration has enacted a new travel ban, sought to pull temporary humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of people, flown immigrants to countries where they are not from and deployed federal law enforcement officers to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other major cities in a made-for-TV show of force to combat crime and illegal immigration.

In that time, the share of registered voters who favor deporting immigrants living in the country illegally — 54 percent — has remained unchanged.

More than 90 percent of Republicans, 52 percent of independents and nearly 20 percent of Democrats continue to broadly support the idea of deporting those here illegally.

More specifically, 51 percent said they thought the government was deporting mostly people who “should be deported,” while 42 percent said the government was deporting the wrong people.

“I feel there were a lot of people who were brought into the country that shouldn’t have been brought into the country,” said Laura Lechner, 67, a Republican and retired radio traffic manager in Wichita, Kan. She cited the record levels of migrants who entered the United States under the Biden administration, saying she believed some had been granted legal status without being properly vetted.

“Removing them is the right thing to do,” she said.

Shaban Binnatli, 33, a home delivery driver in Virginia who voted for Mr. Trump, said U.S. immigration laws would prevent the Trump administration from deporting people who were in the country legally and should not be removed. He also said he trusted Mr. Trump to get it right.

“Even President Trump can’t deport a legal person,” said Mr. Binnatli, who immigrated from Azerbaijan six years ago and has obtained citizenship. “If he can, maybe it’s for a crime and it’s for the safety of America.”

At the same time, the public appears to be wrestling with the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration tactics and how mass deportation has been carried out in practice.

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Federal agents seeking to deport people have been detaining immigrants who show up for their hearings in immigration courts, like this one in New York, where a man from Ecuador was taken into custody in July.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Videos and news reports have captured federal agents surrounding or chasing down immigrant street vendors, delivery drivers and construction workers. Clashes between officers and activists and observers have broken out at courthouses, workplaces and front yards. The apprehensions have entangled beloved community members, undocumented parents with American-born children and spouses, and U.S. citizens, many of whom have been Latino.

More than half of voters, 53 percent, think the process of deporting people has not been fair; 44 percent said it was mostly fair.

A similar share — 52 percent — disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration; 46 percent approve. And 51 percent said his actions around immigration enforcement had gone too far.

In the Trump era, it is has not been uncommon for people to hold what can seem to be contradictory views of the president’s agenda. On issues like crime, tariffs and immigration, voters largely support the aims in concept, but believe that in practice, Mr. Trump’s actions go too far.

A small but substantial share of voters — roughly 15 percent — really embody that dissonance when it comes to immigration. They exist in the complicated middle, saying they are broadly in favor of deportation but believe that Mr. Trump’s administration has been unfair or has gone too far.

These voters are much more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. They largely disapprove specifically of Mr. Trump’s job performance on immigration, but also see a need for increased immigration enforcement.

Patrick Morrissey, 74, a Democrat and retired federal auditor in Albuquerque, said that he generally believed people who had crossed into the country illegally should be deported but that he had mixed feelings about removing those who worked hard and paid taxes.

Mr. Morrissey said he feared the Trump administration was not giving those immigrants a fair chance to plead their cases in court, and he did not approve of the masked federal agents who have descended upon cities.

“The fact that they cover their faces up — that speaks volumes in my mind,” he said. “It reminds me of the 1930s in Germany, the way they go after immigrants, the way they track them down on the street. It doesn’t seem the right way.”

Fietta Campbell, 47, a teacher’s aide in Atlanta who considered herself a moderate rather than a Democrat or Republican, said she believed going through the immigration process to obtain legal residency or citizenship was part of being an American.

“If people have been here three, four years and haven’t taken the legal procedures to be legalized, I can see them deporting someone like that,” she said.

Legal immigration to the United States has become an increasingly difficult path for people from much of the world, as Congress has failed for decades to fix a dated, dysfunctional system.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes green cards, naturalization and other immigration-related applications, has more than 11 million pending cases, the most in at least a decade.

But Ms. Campbell had been disturbed to see U.S. citizens and other people with legal status caught up in the dragnet, she said. In some cases she had read or heard about, she added, people had not been given the chance to show their legal documents or had been ignored when they said they were in the country legally. Others who were deported, including a couple at her grandson’s school, appeared to be “honest, decent, legal parents,” she said.

“I think the Trump administration, they are picking and choosing who they are going after, and it is not making sense,” she said. “The people who they are deporting are the people who are positive influences to America.”

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The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics have prompted protests in many places, including New York, where these demonstrators assembled last month. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Broadly, the country still views immigration positively, according to a recent Gallup survey, which found a rising share of voters who said immigration was a “good thing.”

Voters are divided, however, on whether “open to immigrants” is a good description for America at the current moment: 48 percent said that it described America well, while 49 percent said it did not in the Times/Siena survey.

Three-quarters of Republicans said America was open to immigrants; three-quarters of Democrats said it was not.

Eric Restani, 54, a hair dresser in San Jose, Calif., fell into the latter category. He said the administration was wrongfully casting all immigrants as criminals while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raked neighborhoods in what he likened to a “witch hunt.”

“It’s tearing apart families,” he said. “The moment we are in reminds me a lot of apartheid.”

In Michigan, Arthur Rivera, 46, an I.T. professional and real estate agent who did not affiliate with a political party, said he believed the country remained open to immigrants, judging by the high number of immigrants who held jobs in the tech and engineering industries alone. But he said the nation’s immigration system had been broken for decades.

Growing up in a Hispanic neighborhood in the Detroit area, he said, he knew the system was not fair to immigrants. Applications could take years to process and be too expensive to afford or too complicated to understand. Yet, he also sympathized with friends and family members working as federal immigration agents on the southern border, some of whom had struggled to process the large numbers of migrants crossing under the Biden administration.

“We need change every which way,” he said.

Miriam Jordan contributed reporting.