Media outlets have been claiming for more than a year that the Biden-Harris administration is ramping up removals, with a July Reuters “fact check” claiming more aliens are now being deported than under the Trump administration (which my colleague Jon Feere and I quickly debunked). The latest poll from the George Washington University Society of Presidential Pollsters and Harris X reveals American voters aren’t buying it — and that they have a dour view of ICE, the agency charged with conducting such removals.
That poll was conducted online among 1,505 U.S. registered voters, and it has an overall margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points — not that it matters much, as I’ll explain.
The Administration’s Handling of Immigration. The poll started by asking respondents whether they approved or disapproved of President Biden’s handling of immigration, and the results are unsurprising.
The question actually covered 12 different issue areas, from “racial equity” (where the administration received its best score of “just” 51 percent disapproval) to “abortion” (54 percent disapproval) to the “Israel-Hamas conflict” (63 percent of voters disapproved).
When it came to disapproval, “immigration” and “inflation” tied for first (or last, from the White House’s likely perspective): 64 percent of respondents disapproved of the administration’s handling of each.
And disapproval of the administration’s handling of immigration came from all quarters: Republicans (88 percent disapproval); Independents (67 percent disapproval); and Democrats (37 percent of whom disapproved).
In fact, 37 percent of respondents who said they’d be voting for Kamala Harris for president took a dim view of the administration’s handling of immigration, which likely explains why the current vice president avoids the issue every chance she gets.
“Working or Not Working as an Institution”. The poll quickly gets interesting, however, when it asks respondents whether 17 specific “institutions” — including Congress, the Supreme Court, IRS, the EPA, and “the federal bureaucracy” writ large — are “working or not working”.
Our men and women in uniform receive the best grades, with 78 percent of voters saying that the U.S. military is working. Intelligence agencies (the FBI and the CIA) also receive high marks, with 60 percent of those polled saying that each is “working”.
Things go south, however, once respondents are asked about elected (and unelected) representatives and immigration.
Just 48 percent stated that “the presidency” is working, only slightly more than claimed that “the federal bureaucracy” is working (45 percent), while just 39 percent described Congress as “working”.
Then, there’s the immigration-enforcement agencies. Only 46 percent of respondents believe that “Homeland Security Department/Border Protection” (CBP) works, while the very lowest “working” grade among those 17 institutions overall was “earned” by ICE — 37 percent.
Only a quarter of GOP voters (25 percent) and just a third of Independents (33 percent) thought that ICE was working, which means that the agency likely would have scored even lower if more than half (52 percent) of Democrats didn’t like the way it handles its duties.
Should ICE and CBP Have “More or Less Power”. Admittedly, there are a lot of reasons that span the ideological spectrum that would lead voters to believe that ICE is not working. “Progressives”, for example, may think that ICE is removing too many illegal aliens, while conservatives may think its officers aren’t removing enough.
Fortunately, Harris X asked respondents a similar question about those 17 institutions: “Regardless of who is leading them at any given moment, should [they] have more power, less power, or the same power as now?”
Only 13 percent of voters polled wanted the federal bureaucracy to be given more power, and just 14 percent wanted either the IRS or Congress to be more powerful than they are already.
So, which institutions do voters think should be given more power than they already have? You guessed it — CBP and (in particular) ICE, though you have to dig through the data to get there.
Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, thought that CBP should have the same power that it has right now, 36 percent want CBP to have more power, and 15 percent believe that the agency is too powerful (including, interestingly, 19 percent of Independents and 17 percent of GOP voters).
That latter response likely has something to do with the agency’s “catch and release” border and port policies, particularly given that just 10 percent of Democratic voters wanted a less powerful CBP.
And 39 percent of respondents said that ICE should be more strongly empowered — the biggest “more power” response among those 17 institutions that the poll queried. That includes 29 percent of Democrats, 36 percent of Independents, and more than half — 51 percent — of Republicans.
By the way, “likely voters” were also more likely (41 percent) to say that ICE should be given more power, whereas 45 percent of this cohort wanted the agency’s power to remain the same and only 14 percent wanted ICE to be less powerful.
In other words, if you feel like you are paying more for immigration enforcement and getting less of it, you’re not alone.
In that vein, and to prove the point, ICE was the institution registered voters were most likely to believe had become less powerful over the past 12 months (the response of 29 percent of voters polled), followed directly by CBP (23 percent).
By contrast, a mere 12 percent thought the IRS had become less powerful over that period, and only 13 percent believed that the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the federal bureaucracy, and the National Security Agency (NSA), respectively, had seen their power diminished since September 2022.
Would-be Trump voters are much more likely to say that ICE and CBP had seen their power decline over the past 12 months than any other demographic group (42 percent for ICE and 35 percent for CBP), which likely underscores the saliency of immigration-enforcement for the former president’s campaign.
Those Trump voters were also more likely to be clamoring for ICE (51 percent) and CBP (45 percent) to be given more power than those agencies currently have, though they were tied with respect to such sentiments with those voters aged 65 and older.
More or Less Politicized. Harris X also asked respondents whether each of those 17 institutions are becoming more or less politicized or instead remain independent, and by this point you likely know where the responses are going.
Voters were more likely to view the two leading “political” institutions in the United States — Congress (61 percent) and the presidency (59 percent) as becoming “more politicized” than the rest. That’s practically redundant, though also reflective of a polarized electorate.
ICE, however, took third place among those 17 institutions when it came to the one that is becoming more politicized, with 55 percent of respondents (including 59 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of both Democrats and Independents) describing it thusly.
Next up was CBP, which 53 percent of voters polled described as becoming more politicized. That included 57 percent of Republicans and (notably) 58 percent of Independents. By contrast, fewer than half (45 percent) of Democrats thought that CBP was becoming more politicized.
By the way, likely voters were more likely to view ICE (58 percent) and CBP (55 percent) as becoming more politicized than registered voters overall.
Little Confidence in the Government’s Ability to Regulate Immigration. Saving the best for last, Harris X asked voters how much confidence they had “in the government to fulfill its role in” 11 separate subject areas, from counting votes to collecting taxes to protecting the environment.
Voters were least confident in the government’s ability to “regulate immigration”: just 10 percent of those polled had “quite a lot” of confidence, while 32 percent had no confidence at all when it came to this core government function.
Notably, nearly half — 49 percent — of Republican voters have no confidence at all in the government’s proficiency when it comes to regulating immigration, while “only” 31 percent of GOP voters have the same disdain for the government’s competence in counting votes.
Combined, 60 percent of voters overall have “very little” (28 percent) or no confidence at all in the government’s ability to regulate which aliens come and go from the United States.
That includes 62 percent of Independents (34 percent no confidence; 28 percent very little), 76 percent of Republicans (49 percent no confidence; 27 percent very little), and 41 percent of Democrats (13 percent no confidence; 28 percent very little).
For what it’s worth, 11 percent of Kamala Harris voters have no confidence in the government’s ability to regulate immigration, and 32 percent have very little, for a combined 43 percent.
Voters Are Plainly Paying Attention. Nothing says “regulating immigration” like removing deportable aliens from the United States, and in that area the Biden-Harris administration has fallen far behind not only the Trump administration, but the Obama administration, too.
According to the “Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes Monthly Tables” published by the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), DHS removals have varied over the past 11 fiscal years from a high of nearly 405,000 in FY 2014 to a low of fewer than 85,200 in FY 2021.
It should be noted that Donald Trump was president for the first roughly four months of FY 2021 (October 2020 to January 20, 2021), but more than 42 percent of those removals (36,130) occurred in the first third of that year.
Removals were likely impacted thereafter by a short-lived 100-day moratorium on deportations President Biden implemented minutes after he took office (it was quickly enjoined by a federal judge), but the administration has continued to limit ICE enforcement ever since, fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to preserve its authority not to deport removable aliens.
In any event, DHS removals failed to rebound much in either FY 2022 (just fewer than 103,000 deportations), though they did rise in FY 2023 to more than 178,000 according to OHSS.
Those figures, however, are deceiving, as is OHSS’s report that more than 229,000 aliens had been removed in FY 2024 through the end of May (projected total: more than 343,500).
That’s because the Biden-Harris totals are inflated by the wave of migrants who have crossed the border illegally in the past three-plus years. Of DHS removals in FY 2024, for example, nearly 88 percent were migrants first encountered by CBP at the border, and less than 13 percent (28,260, for a projected total of 42,390) were removable aliens arrested by ICE in the interior.
By contrast, nearly 209,000 of the nearly 909,000 aliens deported under the Trump administration between FY 2018 and FY 2020 (23 percent) were originally arrested by ICE in the interior. Given that there are roughly 1.3 million aliens under final orders of removal who remain in the United States, it’s not like the Biden-Harris DHS couldn’t deport more if it wanted to.
The GW/Harris X poll makes clear that American voters are underwhelmed by immigration enforcement under the Biden-Harris administration, and that they are not fooled by reports that things are getting much better on that front. So expect Trump to highlight the issue between now and November 5, and the vice president to talk about almost anything else.