How Trump’s immigration crackdown is starting to hurt him politically

There’s growing evidence that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is losing public support for its heavy-handed tactics in both detaining undocumented immigrants and cracking down on protests against the immigration sweep.

For months, the White House has pushed a narrative that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is targeting the most violent criminals for deportation and that those protesting the push are radical leftists engaging in domestic terrorism. 

That narrative continued even after an ICE officer in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a white American mother of three. Trump and his officials blamed Good for her death and accused her of running over the federal agent, despite video evidence to the contrary. 

In the wake of that incident, a string of polls suggested public support for the enforcement push was eroding. 

The administration’s knee-jerk justification of this weekend’s fatal shooting of another American citizen protesting ICE in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti, could hardly be expected to reverse that trend.  

Immigration enforcement — a campaign issue that helped propel Trump to victory in 2024 — is becoming "profoundly negative" for the president and the Republicans as a result of ICE’s tactics, says Doug Sosnik, a veteran political strategist who advised Bill Clinton during his time in the White House. 

"This is blocking any positive narrative that the Trump administration is trying to put out about what they're doing on behalf of the American public," Sosnik said in an interview with CBC News.

"In the past [Trump] viewed every day that immigration was an issue was a day that he won. I think we're at a point now where every day that immigration is an issue, he's losing," said Sosnik. 

Some of the January polls indicating notable public opposition to the immigration enforcement push include: 

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington, says repeated violations of constitutional rights have led to plunging public confidence in the federal immigration enforcement push. 

"I think it has turned the public against customs and border patrol," Olson said in an interview with CBC News. 

Olson said Americans are realizing that the incidents aren’t merely a case of particular officers making mistakes, but the result of what he calls "abusive policies" that run roughshod over rights. 

"Name an area of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and by now, they've probably found some way to trample it," he said. 

For the White House, the political worry is that the ICE crackdown galvanizes Democratic voters to turn out in large numbers for the midterms this fall, putting Republican control of Congress at risk, and with it, making Trump a lame-duck president.