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One of the Biggest Myths of the Trump Era Is Unraveling

It turns out that people don’t actually want a Gestapo force rounding up immigrants all over America.

ICE agents walk outside the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California, on July 27, 2026.

Don’t look now, but one of the great shibboleths of the MAGA era is unraveling: the notion that a brutal crackdown on undocumented immigrants represents a key political strength of the Trumpified Republican Party. The campaign to deploy blanket ICE raids to terrorize immigrants—and, simultaneously, the Democratic-led states and cities targeted by the White House—has proven to be so broadly unpopular that it’s emerging as a central worry for Republican political operatives on the eve of the midterms. 

Just 37 percent of respondents in a recent Kennedy School survey approved of Trump’s mass deportation regime, and the paramilitary command structure of the immigration sweeps was even less popular, with just 33 percent professing support for ICE, 31 percent backing ICE raids in the workplace, and 34 percent approving of the use of the military in rounding up immigrants. 

What’s more, voters are decidedly skeptical about the Trump administration’s belated—and mostly fictional—effort to make it seem as though it’s dialing back on ICE’s Gestapo sieges. In a new Politico survey, carried out by the polling firm Public First, a majority of respondents agree that there’s been at least a small shift in the White House’s immigration tactics. But a 44 percent plurality say that the changes make no difference in how much they trust the administration, while nearly a third—30 percent—say that they’re now less likely to extend such trust. Notably, the same core topline result holds for Trump voters in the survey: 71 percent said they observed a shift in enforcement tactics, but 48 percent reported that it made no difference in their trust in the White House. And while you might presume that trust level to be high, it’s nowhere near what the lords of MAGA messaging would want. Indeed, 15 percent of Trump voters now believe that the ICE raids are “too aggressive”—not what party leaders were hoping for when the 2024 Republican National Convention broke out into chants of “Mass deportation now!” 

The scale of disaffection with Trump’s gulag state presents a huge opportunity for........

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