Voters favor deporting those in US illegally, but say Trump has gone too far

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detain an immigrant from Ecuador outside their court hearing at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York, US, on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. Nine months into President Donald 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. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

By RUTH IGIELNIK and JAZMINE ULLOA

Nine months into President Donald 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 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% — has remained unchanged.

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

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

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.

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, people in the country illegally with American-born children and spouses, and U.S. citizens, many of whom have been Latino.

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

A similar share — 52% — disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration; 46% approve. And 51% 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, Trump’s actions go too far.

A small but substantial share of voters — roughly 15% — 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 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 Trump’s job performance on immigration, but they also see a need for increased immigration enforcement.

Patrick Morrissey, 74, a Democrat and retired federal auditor in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 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.

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 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.”

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% said that it described America well, while 49% 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, California, 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 information technology 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.