Will racism win? More than half of voters support Trump’s promised mass deportation

Report Issue

Please complete the required fields.

Your Name

Email

Reason (required)
This post contains broken linksPost has incorrect informationPost has spamCopyright IssueOther

Description

Submit

Donald Trump’s plan to mount the “largest deportation effort in American history” has more support than one might think. Specifically, 54% of voters back the Republican candidate’s star policy, according to a Scripps News/Ipsos poll published Wednesday. By party affiliation, 86% of Republicans favor the measure, along with a quarter of Democrats. And while the poll shows that a higher percentage of voters have a more favorable opinion of Kamala Harris than Trump, 44% of them are confident that the former president would do a better job of handling the issue of immigration than the vice president (at 34%).

In line with several previous polls, the Scripps News/Ipsos survey places immigration among voters’ top three concerns heading into the November 5 vote: 39% cite it as one of the most important issues facing the country, second only to inflation, which tops the list at 57%. Securing the country’s southern border with Mexico was identified as the country’s top immigration priority.

As for which restrictive immigration policies they would like to see implemented, 69% support limiting the number of immigrants who can apply for asylum, as the Joe Biden administration has done since last June. In addition, 62% agree that local law enforcement should be able to detain immigrants, a power reserved for the federal government but which several conservative states — most notably Texas, but also Louisiana and Iowa — have tried to take over with laws that make irregular immigration a crime and allow local police to arrest and detain people suspected of being undocumented.

In third place is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants: 54% said they “strongly” or “somewhat” supported this proposal, a central part of the Republican Party’s immigration policy. Trump has been promising for months that he will expel 11 million people from the country, but has not specified how, when or whom he would deport, beyond assuring that he would use the military and law enforcement to do so.

Without offering any other details, the candidate recently said the deportations would begin in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado. In recent weeks, Trump and his campaign have disseminated lies about immigrants in these two locations, falsely accusing Springfield’s Haitian community of eating local pets and claiming that a Venezuelan criminal gang has taken over Aurora.

How would mass deportation of migrants under Trump actually work?