Donald Trump’s former adviser is urging the White House to clue the president in on how unhappy voters are with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s heavy-handed tactics.
David Urban, a senior adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign and now CNN’s senior political commentator, said the daily images of masked ICE agents violently manhandling people—coupled with the shooting of Minneapolis woman Renee Good—threaten to tank support for Trump ahead of the crucial midterm elections.
“Americans overwhelmingly voted for this president. If you look at the numbers and the reasons given, it was to secure the border and crack down on what was kind of a sieve of a border under the Biden administration,” Urban told CNN News Central. “And there’s a lot of support for that in America.”
“What there isn’t support for—and the polling bears this out, this isn’t David Urban’s opinion, this is the polling—is what people are seeing on their screens right now,” he added. “They don’t want to see masked men geared up like Delta Force walking down the streets of America, asking people for their papers, throwing them on the ground, zip-tying people who are doing Sheetrock, gardeners, nannies. They don’t want to see that. That’s not what they voted for. It is really hurting this president in the numbers in an area where he was strongest, immigration.”
The Trump administration has sent thousands of federal agents into Minneapolis as part of a sweeping mass deportation campaign promised by Trump in the run-up to his 2024 win.
Tensions in the city have reached a fever pitch after the fatal shooting of Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The 37-year-old mother of three appeared to be trying to drive away from agents who had surrounded her vehicle in footage of the shooting, though Trump and his allies have claimed she tried to “weaponize” her vehicle.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Monday found that a majority of U.S. adults (53 percent) believe the shooting of Good was not justified, compared with just 35 percent who said Ross was correct to fire three times at point-blank range.
The survey also found that 57 percent disapprove of ICE’s aggressive enforcement of Trump’s immigration policies, while 40 percent approve.
Elsewhere, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released Tuesday found that significantly more adults believe ICE’s immigration raids are doing “more harm than good” (54 percent) than those who believe they are doing “more good than harm” (34 percent).
During his CNN appearance, Urban also noted that Joe Rogan—the hugely influential podcaster who backed Trump in 2024—has begun criticizing ICE’s tactics to his massive audience.
“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?” Rogan asked, referencing Adolf Hitler’s secret police in Nazi Germany. “‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”
Urban said he thinks Trump needs to be “made more aware” of how politically damaging ICE’s actions could be in November’s nationwide elections, where the GOP faces an uphill battle to maintain control of the House and possibly even the Senate.
“When you lose Joe Rogan, you’ve got a problem,” Urban said. “And I hope the White House takes this to heart, because people don’t want to see this kind of behavior from ICE.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
