Poll: Americans Aren’t Fooled by Immigration Enforcement Claims

Media outlets have been claiming for more than a year that the Biden-Harris administration is ramping up removals, with a July Reuters “fact check” claiming more aliens are now being deported than under the Trump administration (which my colleague Jon Feere and I quickly debunked). The latest poll from the George Washington University Society of Presidential Pollsters and Harris X reveals American voters aren’t buying it — and that they have a dour view of ICE, the agency charged with conducting such removals.

That poll was conducted online among 1,505 U.S. registered voters, and it has an overall margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points — not that it matters much, as I’ll explain.

The Administration’s Handling of Immigration. The poll started by asking respondents whether they approved or disapproved of President Biden’s handling of immigration, and the results are unsurprising.

The question actually covered 12 different issue areas, from “racial equity” (where the administration received its best score of “just” 51 percent disapproval) to “abortion” (54 percent disapproval) to the “Israel-Hamas conflict” (63 percent of voters disapproved).

When it came to disapproval, “immigration” and “inflation” tied for first (or last, from the White House’s likely perspective): 64 percent of respondents disapproved of the administration’s handling of each.

And disapproval of the administration’s handling of immigration came from all quarters: Republicans (88 percent disapproval); Independents (67 percent disapproval); and Democrats (37 percent of whom disapproved).

In fact, 37 percent of respondents who said they’d be voting for Kamala Harris for president took a dim view of the administration’s handling of immigration, which likely explains why the current vice president avoids the issue every chance she gets.

“Working or Not Working as an Institution”. The poll quickly gets interesting, however, when it asks respondents whether 17 specific “institutions” — including Congress, the Supreme Court, IRS, the EPA, and “the federal bureaucracy” writ large — are “working or not working”.

Our men and women in uniform receive the best grades, with 78 percent of voters saying that the U.S. military is working. Intelligence agencies (the FBI and the CIA) also receive high marks, with 60 percent of those polled saying that each is “working”.

Things go south, however, once respondents are asked about elected (and unelected) representatives and immigration.

Just 48 percent stated that “the presidency” is working, only slightly more than claimed that “the federal bureaucracy” is working (45 percent), while just 39 percent described Congress as “working”.

Then, there’s the immigration-enforcement agencies. Only 46 percent of respondents believe that “Homeland Security Department/Border Protection” (CBP) works, while the very lowest “working” grade among those 17 institutions overall was “earned” by ICE — 37 percent.

Only a quarter of GOP voters (25 percent) and just a third of Independents (33 percent) thought that ICE was working, which means that the agency likely would have scored even lower if more than half (52 percent) of Democrats didn’t like the way it handles its duties.

Should ICE and CBP Have “More or Less Power”. Admittedly, there are a lot of reasons that span the ideological spectrum that would lead voters to believe that ICE is not working. “Progressives”, for example, may think that ICE is removing too many illegal aliens, while conservatives may think its officers aren’t removing enough.

Fortunately, Harris X asked respondents a similar question about those 17 institutions: “Regardless of who is leading them at any given moment, should [they] have more power, less power, or the same power as now?”

Only 13 percent of voters polled wanted the federal bureaucracy to be given more power, and just 14 percent wanted either the IRS or Congress to be more powerful than they are already.

So, which institutions do voters think should be given more power than they already have? You guessed it — CBP and (in particular) ICE, though you have to dig through the data to get there.

Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, thought that CBP should have the same power that it has right now, 36 percent want CBP to have more power, and 15 percent believe that the agency is too powerful (including, interestingly, 19 percent of Independents and 17 percent of GOP voters).

That latter response likely has something to do with the agency’s “catch and release” border and port policies, particularly given that just 10 percent of Democratic voters wanted a less powerful CBP.

And 39 percent of respondents said that ICE should be more strongly empowered — the biggest “more power” response among those 17 institutions that the poll queried. That includes 29 percent of Democrats, 36 percent of Independents, and more than half — 51 percent — of Republicans.

By the way, “likely voters” were also more likely (41 percent) to say that ICE should be given more power, whereas 45 percent of this cohort wanted the agency’s power to remain the same and only 14 percent wanted ICE to be less powerful.

In other words, if you feel like you are paying more for immigration enforcement and getting less of it, you’re not alone.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Poll-Americans-Arent-Fooled-Immigration-Enforcement-Claims

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