Trump is right about border and criminals, but he's losing voters with mass deportations
Yet the only thing falling faster than illegal crossings has been his approval rating on immigration.
The problem: Instead of building on his win at the border with more popular arrests of criminal threats inside the country, the administration is going after migrants indiscriminately.
Democrats can't deny it: The border crisis is over. Border Patrol arrests have fallen nearly 90% since December to near-record lows.
Nonetheless, only 40% of voters approved of the president's handling of immigration in a July Quinnipiac poll, while 55% disapproved. The 15-point approval deficit contrasts with a +1 rating in the January Q-poll. Other polls show similarly dramatic declines.
Of course, people don't actually want more illegal immigration. Polls consistently show that the president is the most trusted on the border.
Instead, it's the deportations from within the United States driving the discontent. Quinnipiac's July poll found that only 38% approve of how the administration is handling deportations.
That doesn't mean voters back the other side — 84% of disagree with Democrats who want to suspend deportations completely, according to a March Pew Research Center poll.
But Trump emphasized that he would prioritize ending 'sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals' — the position of 81% of voters.
Unfortunately, most voters don't believe the president is doing that right now.
Even as late as June, voters told CBS News they thought that the president was prioritizing 'dangerous criminals' over peaceful immigrants 53%-47%. By mid-July, it was 44%-56% the other way — an 18-point swing in a month.
What happened? Voters started to see how the priorities shifted.
According to The Post's reporting, agents were instructed in late May to focus on 'quantity over quality' to meet a 3,000-per-day 'goal' set by the White House. ICE was advised to target people looking for work at Home Depot and to raid businesses in industries likely to employ illegal workers.
Rather than scooping up violent criminals recklessly sent back to the streets by New York City or even cleaning out the homeless shelters costing New York taxpayers a fortune, ICE is arresting immigrants who are helping power the Trump economy.
Since the White House ordered the change, there has been a dramatic escalation in arrests of people without criminal records.
In June, the number of immigrants arrested without criminal convictions was 1,100% higher than it was even in 2017 during the first Trump term: nearly 6,000 per week.
Yet there are still half a million illegal immigrants with criminal convictions out there to remove — and ICE should locate them before spending its time and resources on workers.
It's common sense: ICE agents told The Post that the policy was 'leading them to leave some dangerous criminal illegal migrants on the streets.'
Setting aside politics and crime, Trump has already publicly acknowledged there's an economic downside to these non-criminal deportations.
'Our aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' he said in June, referencing farms, hotels, and leisure businesses.
The president is correct. Besides the border, the president's other primary election issue was inflation.
And immigrants reduce inflation — not, as critics claim, by depressing wages for American workers, but by increasing production of goods and services.
When supply decreases, prices go up for consumers, as we painfully saw throughout the pandemic.
Immigrant workers also benefit their American counterparts: Companies invest more when there is enough labor to quickly construct and fully man facilities, and Americans end up in better jobs as managers and supervisors when immigrant workers fill lesser-skilled jobs.
Booting the nearly 2 million illegal-immigrant construction workers will pull Americans out of those better-paying jobs, not into the labor force.
Whatever the immigration politics are, Trump's midterm success will ultimately depend most on his economic outcomes.
Americans re-elected him because they remember his first term before the pandemic as a period of stable wage and job growth — but random mass deportations are both politically unpopular and economically destabilizing.
Although the president has promised 'changes are coming' on deportations, none have yet occurred.
In April, Trump floated the idea that employers might be able to sponsor their illegal workers for visas if the workers leave the country and return legally. That's a great starting point: If no employer is willing to vouch for them, deportation likely won't have much economic downside.
The president has diagnosed the problem. He's come up with a viable solution. And the One Big Beautiful Bill shows he's capable of navigating controversial legislation across the finish line.
With the economy slowing and midterms looming, there's no reason to wait.
David J. Bier is Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute.
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