The open-borders crowd keeps insisting the American public is turning against President Trump’s deportation agenda.
The polling data keeps proving them wrong.
And a new AP-NORC survey just pulled back the curtain on numbers that have Democrats scrambling to explain what is happening with their own voters.
The Numbers the Media Buried
The AP-NORC survey asked respondents whether the Trump administration has gone too far or not far enough across a series of immigration scenarios. When asked specifically about “deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally,” 47 percent said Trump has “gone too far” — down from 52 percent who said the same in February.
That five-point drop is not a rounding error. That is a measurable shift in public sentiment over roughly five months, moving in exactly the direction the America First movement has been pushing.
Further, 32 percent said the Trump administration is “about right” in its approach to deporting illegal aliens, a figure that has remained consistent since February.
A growing percentage of Americans — now 18 percent, up from 14 percent in February — say the Trump administration is not going far enough in deporting immigrants living in the US illegally.
Put those numbers together and you get something the legacy media is not eager to headline: a combined 50 percent of Americans either support the pace of deportations or want them accelerated. The group demanding Trump pump the brakes has shrunk to less than half the country.
A growing percentage of respondents also say the Trump administration has not gone far enough in restricting legal immigration, growing to 14 percent, up from 11 percent in February.
Independents Are Moving, and That Should Terrify Democrats
The partisan breakdown here is where things get genuinely interesting for anyone watching the 2026 midterm landscape.
Views among Republicans and Democrats are similar to those expressed in February, but independents are now less likely to say Trump has gone too far in sending immigration agents into US cities, restricting legal immigration, or deporting immigrants living in the US illegally.
Independents are also more likely to say Trump has not gone far enough in sending immigration agents into US cities.
That is the number that should keep Democrat strategists up at night. Republicans were always going to support enforcement. Democrats were always going to oppose it. But independents — the voters who actually decide elections in competitive states — are drifting toward the enforcement side of the argument. Not dramatically, not in a way that produces screaming headlines, but steadily and in one direction.
And that matters because the Democrat Party spent the last several years telling those same independent voters that aggressive immigration enforcement was extreme, cruel, and un-American. The voters are apparently not buying it.
The survey was taken July 23-27, 2026, among 1,165 adults nationwide and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percent.
What ICE Is Actually Doing Out There
The poll comes as the Department of Homeland Security continues to document federal agents taking what DHS describes as the “worst of the worst” off American streets.
These are not abstract enforcement statistics. ICE announced the arrest of criminal illegal aliens over the weekend convicted for despicable crimes including homicide, sexual assault on children, rape, aggravated assault, and kidnapping.
Among those taken into custody: Juan Mauricio Castillo, a criminal illegal alien from El Salvador convicted for homicide in Washoe County, Nevada; Carlos Tino-Garcia, a criminal illegal alien from Guatemala convicted for first-degree sexual assault in Lincoln, Nebraska; and Antonio De Jesus Andrade-Ochoa, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico convicted for second-degree rape in Georgetown, Delaware.
But the open-borders advocates in Congress and in the media want the public focused on the optics of enforcement rather than on what enforcement is actually removing from American neighborhoods.
According to DHS, 70 percent of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the US — and that figure does not even include foreign fugitives, terrorists, and gang members who lack a rap sheet in the US.
The people demanding Trump scale back deportations are, in effect, demanding that convicted murderers, child predators, and rapists be left in American communities. That is not a compassionate position. That is a reckless one.
What the Trend Actually Means
Democrats have a theory about immigration enforcement, and the theory goes something like this: the more Trump deports, the more the public will recoil, the more the political ground shifts, and the more the midterms become a referendum on cruelty rather than on crime and sovereignty. That theory is not aging well.
Every month that ICE publishes its arrest logs — murderers, child predators, rapists, traffickers — the abstract debate about enforcement gets a very concrete answer. Voters can see what is being removed. They can read the charges. And increasingly, they are concluding that the administration is not going far enough.
President Trump ran in 2024 on the clearest immigration platform in modern political history. Mass deportations. Restored sovereignty. Enforcement of the law. Voters gave him that mandate, and the polling now shows that mandate is not eroding — it is consolidating.
The Democrat Party’s best argument against enforcement has always been a moral one: that mass deportations are inherently inhumane. But that argument runs into trouble when the people being deported are convicted killers and child rapists. It runs into further trouble when independent voters — the people Democrats need to win — are moving toward the “not far enough” column rather than toward the opposition.
And it runs into the most trouble of all when the pollster doing the measuring is the Associated Press, not some right-wing outfit Democrats can dismiss as partisan. The AP-NORC Center is about as establishment as polling gets. When their numbers show the enforcement coalition growing, that is not a conservative talking point. That is a data point the Left has to reckon with.
The question going forward is not whether the public supports removing criminal illegal aliens from American communities. That question has already been answered. The question is whether the political class in Washington, DC will catch up to where the country already is — or keep pretending the polls say something they plainly do not.
Sources: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, July 23-27, 2026; Breitbart News, August 7, 2026; US Department of Homeland Security press releases, July-August 2026.
