CNN
—
When we look back at the passage of President Donald Trump’s big agenda bill in a few years, it’s quite possible that it won’t be the extension of the tax cuts or the cuts to Medicaid that will stick out, but rather its historic expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The bill delivered ICE a huge windfall ($75 billion through 2029) that should make it by far the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the US government. PolitiFact calculated that ICE could be funded at an average annual rate of $27.7 billion, compared to the FBI’s $10 billion budget.
This has led to plenty of concern among Trump’s critics about what that expansion will entail. He’s already signaled he’s willing to go to very controversial places in using law enforcement for his federal immigration crackdown and the military to back up his deportation efforts. He’ll also have more control over ICE than he would with the FBI, given post-Watergate reforms that made the FBI and the broader Justice Department more independent of the president. ICE has fewer such guardrails surrounding it.
And even setting aside further potential politicization of federal law enforcement, there are the problems that can emerge when trying to quickly hire thousands of people for difficult jobs. A rapid 2000s-era expansion of the US Border Patrol led to standards being relaxed and a spike in misconduct.
Whether any of that comes to pass remains to be seen. But what has become abundantly clear in recent days is that this expansion is ill-timed, politically speaking.
Americans are increasingly quite negative toward ICE and skeptical of its actions.
In fact, their views of ICE appear to be even worse than when some prominent liberals promoted an effort starting in 2018 to “abolish ICE.”
Several polls have tested the agency in recent weeks, and the verdicts are universally quite bad.
A Quinnipiac University poll showed voters disapproved of how ICE was enforcing immigration laws, 57% to 39%. ICE’s numbers on immigration were even slightly worse than Trump’s.
An NPR-PBS News-Marist College poll last month showed 54% of Americans said ICE had “gone too far” in enforcing immigration laws.
And a CNN poll released last weekend showed Americans opposed Trump’s expanded ICE funding, 53-31%.
That last one would seem very telling. People generally like the idea of spending more money on things they view as important, which to many would seem to be deporting undocumented migrants. But disapproving of this funding wasn’t even a close call to a public that is increasingly concerned about the tenor of Trump’s deportations.
In each of these polls, independents were even more negative than the overall numbers. Among those independents, 63% disapproved of ICE’s actions in the Quinnipiac poll, 59% said it had gone too far in the Marist poll, and 58% opposed the new funding in the CNN poll.
All of those numbers suggest ICE is in even worse position than it was back in 2018, when the first Trump administration’s family separation policy spurred some Democrats to argue for its abolition.
“Abolish ICE” was a highly unpopular idea pushed mostly by a handful of very liberal Democrats, and Republicans used it to great political effect before Democrats distanced themselves from the idea.
But even at that time, ICE didn’t seem to be as unpopular as it is today.
NBC-Wall Street Journal, AP-NORC, Pew Research Center and Fox News polls conducted between 2018 and 2020 generally showed Americans were about evenly split on ICE, if a bit negative.
Out of nine polls during this time, only one showed ICE underwater by double digits – a September 2019 Pew survey that showed Americans viewed ICE unfavorably by a 54-42% margin.
This comparison isn’t completely apples-to-apples. Even the Quinnipiac survey today showing ICE 18 points underwater is about how it’s enforcing immigration laws, rather than the institution as a whole.
Still, the fact that the findings are similar across multiple polls testing various questions about ICE suggests Americans have truly soured to a new degree on the agency – even as it’s set to undergo a massive expansion.
Trump border czar Tom Homan defended ICE on Tuesday, telling MSNBC that the agency is simply enforcing laws enacted by Congress.
But if Trump does make ICE front-and-center to his agenda in the coming months and years, that could seemingly be a problem with Americans. And to the extent he goes to yet more controversial places with it, it could be a flashpoint in his second term.
