The American public is turning against the president’s aggressive ICE strategy after a violent start to the new year.
A new poll from CBS News/YouGov conducted between Jan. 14-16, found that President Donald Trump lost significant support for his immigration agenda since last month. Americans are pulling their backing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement following several high-profile violent encounters with the public.
The poll reported majority of people (52 percent) think that ICE is making communities less safe. Most Americans believe that ICE is “too tough” in its tactics (61 percent) and that the agency is not prioritizing dangerous criminals (56 percent).
While people are split 50-50 on Trump’s stated immigration goals, two-thirds of Americans dislike the actual execution of his deportation program. When split into party lines, Republicans largely support Trump’s deportation of undocumented immigrants and believe that ICE protestors “have gone too far.”
The poll was conducted after Minneapolis mother Renee Nicole Good, 37, was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, 43, after she dropped her 6-year-old child off at school on Jan. 7. Ross shot Good in the head when she tried to drive away from him. Video captured the entire incident, including one ICE agent calling Good a “f---ing b----” after she was shot.
Trump and his MAGA acolytes have been smearing Good since, with the president insinuating she was part of the “Radical Left” on Truth Social. ICE Barbie Kristi Noem has claimed that Good intentionally tried to hit Ross with her car and accused the late mother of “domestic terrorism.”
When it comes to Good’s killing, 54 percent of Americans believe that the shooting was not justified, according to the CBS poll. The incident has also influenced people’s views on ICE, with 53 percent saying that the agency’s operations should be decreased following Good’s death.
Good’s death and Trump’s federal invasion of Minneapolis inspired anti-ICE protests in 500 cities across the country, which demanded accountability from the agency. Anti-ICE sentiment has sent Trump aides into a panic. The administration’s own internal polling revealed that the majority of Americans don’t support the agency’s current tactics.
“He wants deportations,” one senior White House aide told Axios about Trump. “He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”
That internal panic has not changed external actions so far. FBI director Kash Patel announced that he was launching a probe into “organizers and funders” of the protests. He claimed that the Chinese Communist Party was involved in the demonstrations, although there’s no evidence to support this.
Negative sentiment toward ICE has only grown in January. The CBS News poll is not the only one that affirms this. A recent poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 46 percent of people support abolishing ICE, up from 19 percent in September 2024.
A Homeland Security whistleblower allegedly leaked the personal information of over 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees in the wake of Good’s killing. The growing anti-ICE sentiment has spooked many agents.
CBS News, which conducted the Sunday polling on Trump’s ICE policies, has received its own backlash for its new "pro-America" direction. Critics have bashed new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss for being overly friendly with the president, while new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil has seen ratings drop since he took over the desk this month.
