Dem
47
GOP
53
Politics is sometimes weird. Donald Trump's immigration policies, especially his execution of them, is wildly unpopular, but his broad goals have much broader support. Part of this is due to framing. Democrats want to frame the unrest in L.A. as a story about due process and government overreach. But Trump is framing (paywall) it as a a story about crime and border security. On these issues, Trump is +9 and +4 with the voters, respectively. What he has done is convince voters that the people he is targeting are criminals who deserve what they are getting. In that way, he wins, even though his actual policies on immigration are not popular.
The desirability of deporting migrants changes radically when different questions are asked:
Trump voters want everyone deported and everyone wants to deport violent criminals. However, registered voters as a whole do not want to deport people who have lived in the U.S. for years without committing any crimes, or dreamers, either. When these numbers are broken down by race, Black and Latino voters are much more forgiving than white voters. Even on the dreamers, who get the most sympathy—74% of Latino, 72% of Black, but only 56% of white voters—want to allow them to stay. Also noteworthy is that across all groups, over 60% want undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens to be allowed to stay.
Trump doesn't need the poll results to understand that lying about the deportees all being violent criminals makes an otherwise unpopular argument popular. He understands intuitively the power of lying and does it constantly. Very few people are capable of understanding that if ICE enters a church or hospital and starts rounding up people, very few of them are criminals and even fewer are violent criminals. But Trump's story line is persuasive. YouGov asked about that. Indeed, 53% of all voters, including 43% of Latinos and 46% of independents, think that Trump is prioritizing violent criminals, when in fact ICE is making no effort at all to locate violent criminals. It is much too difficult to find them, and locating one here and one there does not make for good television, which is what Trump wants. (V).