A top Trump enforcer is privately instructing Republicans to stop touting the president’s key campaign pledge, according to a report.
White House deputy chief of staff James Blair told House Republicans to stop emphasizing “mass deportations” during a policy listening session at their annual retreat in Doral, Florida, Axios reports.
Blair, the 36-year-old political director for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, advised Republicans to center their messaging on deporting violent offenders, sources in the closed-door briefing told Axios.
President Donald Trump’s tactical retreat from his signature campaign pledge indicates that the White House fears that Americans have soured on the issue that had defined the MAGA agenda until recently.
Shortly after Axios’ reported his remarks, Blair appeared to test out his new talking point himself, posting on X, “Republicans will get the violent criminals out. Democrats will throw the border back open,” without mentioning mass deportations.
Trump made mass deportations the centerpiece of his anti-immigrant 2024 campaign, declaring that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promising “the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.”
But just over a year into his second term, support for his deportation agenda has slipped as federal immigration agents—reportedly under pressure from the Trump administration to make a daily quota of arrests—have employed aggressive tactics to round up and deport migrants.
A Politico poll published on Jan. 24, after federal immigration agents killed Renee Good but before they killed Alex Pretti, found that 49 percent of Americans say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive—including 1 in 5 voters who supported Trump in 2024.
In a Feb. 20 Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 58 percent said that Trump is “going too far” deporting undocumented immigrants—a rise of eight points since the fall—and 62 percent opposed ICE’s tactics.
And while immigration has long been one of the president’s strongest issues, an NBC News survey conducted Feb. 27 to March 3 found that 54 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration—a level of disapproval that matched how voters rated his performance on foreign policy and Iran.
NBC News’ poll also found that Democrats lead the Republicans by 6 points, with 50 percent to the GOP’s 44 percent, in the fight for control of Congress ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Voters still trust Republicans more than Democrats on immigration and border security, but the GOP’s advantages are slipping. Their lead on border security has dropped from 31 points in late October to 27 points, and their edge on immigration has fallen from 18 points to 12 points.
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast, “Nobody is changing the Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda. President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities. As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, approximately 70% of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records. Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately 3 million illegals have left the United States, either through forced deportation or self-deportation, with zero illegals coming through the most secure border in U.S. History for nine straight months.”
