Immigration Enforcement

Immigration is one of the deepest dividing lines in today’s American politics. The Trump-era Republican Party emphasizes border control and deportation. The Democratic party emphasizes balancing enforcement with immigrant rights.

Yet the polls from the past few years show something important beneath the divide. Across party lines, Americans have repeatedly converged against whichever part of the immigration system looked most out of control. In 2024, it was record numbers of migrants at the southern border. By 2026, it was deportations without due process and aggressive interior enforcement without accountability.

Although some might see this as public opinion shifting, it’s actually a consistent message: Americans want immigration law enforced, particularly at the border, but they also want enforcement to be targeted, lawful, and accountable.

The 2024 Border Crisis

February 29, 2024 was the symbolic height of a border crisis that had been building since the end of the 2020–2021 COVID period. On that day, President Joe Biden and then–presidential candidate Donald Trump separately visited the southern border to show their engagement with the issue.

The reason was clear: Immigration had become one of the defining issues of the 2024 campaign. In fiscal year 2023, there had been 2.5 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, an all-time high, topping the prior year’s record.

Just weeks before Biden and Trump visited the border, the Pew Research Center reported that 78% of Americans—including majorities of both Republicans and Democrats—believed the border situation was either a “crisis” or a “major problem.”

Biden had backed a bipartisan Senate package that paired new border-control funding with foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The border provisions would have added resources for the Border Patrol, asylum officers, and immigration judges, while also tightening some asylum procedures. But Republican support collapsed after Trump argued that a border deal would give Democrats an election-year victory on an issue that had become politically damaging for Biden.

The public’s mood was visible that summer, when cross-partisan majorities agreed the U.S. should hire significantly more Border Patrol agents:

Yet that same poll found that cross-partisan majorities also supported offering citizenship to immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, if they met certain requirements over time:

In other words, the public wanted more control at the border, but did not want to punish longtime residents whose unauthorized status was not their choice.

Meanwhile, in June 2024 Biden issued a Presidential Proclamation that restricted migrants from seeking asylum, a major change from earlier policy stances. When Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024, Kamala Harris picked up the theme, saying the Democrats had acted in June 2024 because Trump had scuttled the bipartisan border legislation in February.

For many voters, that message felt like too little, too late. The border crisis had helped Trump make his core immigration argument: Democrats had lost control, and only a tougher enforcement approach could restore it.

From Border Control to Interior Enforcement

Trump won the 2024 presidential election. When he took office in January 2025, he immediately declared a national emergency at the southern border, allowing himself, the Homeland Security Department, and the Defense Department wide latitude to secure the border. Border crossings had already been far down from their peak, but additional measures by the Trump administration led to a further decline in border encounters.By the end of 2025, border encounters had fallen to the lowest level since the statistic was recorded.

Politically, that changed the center of gravity. The issue that had helped Trump in 2024—border disorder—became less visible. Instead, it was replaced by his administration’s aggressive push into immigration enforcement within the country’s interior.

Initially, the plan focused on identifying and deporting people who had committed serious crimes—a concept with broad cross-partisan support:

But the administration’s enforcement campaign soon produced cases that did not fit neatly into the “violent criminals” frame:

• Kilmar Ábrego García became a national symbol of deportation without due process after the government sent him to El Salvador despite prior legal protections, then resisted efforts to bring him back.

• Mahmoud Khalil became a different kind of symbol: a legal U.S. permanent resident whose detention raised questions about whether immigration authority was being used to punish protected pro-Palestinian speech.

With those cases in the news, cross-partisan public opinion reacted:

Concerns about enforcement tactics came to a head in January 2026 in Minnesota. Operation Metro Surge had flooded the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area with thousands of federal immigration officers. The operation generated protests, lawsuits, and national attention after the killings of two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal immigration officers.

Again, cross-partisan public opinion reacted—this time by demanding more accountability for immigration officers:

By mid-February 2026, the administration had partly recalibrated. Operation Metro Surge was winding down, and the remaining federal immigration officers in Minnesota were required to wear body cameras.

Since then, interior immigration enforcement has continued, but without large, aggressive deployments like Operation Metro Surge. Instead, federal enforcement agencies have increasingly focused on collaborating with local law enforcement. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired in early March 2026. She had been the highly visible face of the second Trump administration’s most controversial immigration-enforcement actions.

One Message

From 2024 to 2026, immigration policy swung from the Biden administration’s border crisis to the second Trump administration’s interior-enforcement backlash. During this time, opinion polls showed plenty of disagreement among Republicans and Democrats on topics like birthright citizenship, appropriate levels of legal immigration, and the status of long-term unauthorized residents who haven’t committed crimes. But there was always an undercurrent of agreement around a basic message:

• The border must be secured.

• Serious criminal offenders should be deported, with due process.

• Interior enforcement must follow the rules, be targeted, and remain accountable.

There are reasonable debates about how to interpret each component of the message. Nevertheless, the events of 2024 to 2026 show that when a component was clearly violated, public backlash—across party lines—created pressure for correction.