Poll: 65% of Americans Say ICE Has 'Gone Too Far' in Major Immigration Shift

It's a peculiar American habit: to discover you're uncomfortable with state power only after you've seen it up close, preferably on a phone screen, preferably with subtitles. For weeks, images of masked, armed immigration agents detaining people in public spaces have ricocheted around social media, and the country has done what it now does by reflex—argued, polarised, donated, protested, doubled down.

Then came the numbers. And they're awkward for the White House.

A new PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans—65%—now say Immigration and Customs Enforcement has 'gone too far' in enforcing immigration laws. That's a notable jump from 54% last June, when the Trump administration's enhanced enforcement efforts began in Los Angeles and the argument still sounded, to some ears, like a campaign promise becoming policy.

The shift isn't just a gentle drift. It's a warning light.

Poll: 65% Of Americans Say ICE Has 'Gone Too Far'—And Trump Feels The Heat

In the same poll, six in ten Americans disapprove of the job ICE is doing, with only about three in ten approving. The partisan split is predictable but still startling in its scale: 91% of Democrats and 66% of independents disapprove, while 73% of Republicans approve of ICE's work. This is not consensus politics; it is two countries watching the same footage and describing different realities.

The poll also suggests a deeper, more corrosive problem for enforcement agencies: legitimacy. A majority—62%—say ICE's actions are making Americans less safe, while 37% believe they are making the country more safe. 'Less safe' is a loaded phrase. It doesn't mean 'I disagree'. It means 'I'm scared'—of mistakes, of escalation, of the wrong person being grabbed in the wrong place by the wrong team.​

Even President Donald Trump has seemed to hear the temperature change. According to reporting on his comments this week, he said the federal response 'could use a "bit of a softer touch"' while still remaining 'tough'. In Trump-speak, that's practically an apology—though, characteristically, it arrives without any admission that policy itself might be the problem.​

What makes the current moment different is that the backlash isn't purely ideological. It's visceral. When enforcement is carried out in plain sight, with masks and rifles and people shoved against walls, the politics gets emotional quickly. Support can evaporate the moment voters start imagining their neighbour, their colleague, their cousin—someone 'who belongs'—on the wrong end of a detention.

Poll: 65% Of Americans Say ICE Has 'Gone Too Far' As Protests Gain Support

The poll suggests Americans are not simply angry at ICE; many are also sympathetic to the people pushing back. By a 59% to 40% margin, respondents said anti-ICE protests are mostly legitimate rather than mostly unlawful. That matters because protest legitimacy is often where public opinion goes to die, especially when demonstrations become disruptive.​

The wider political drama swirling around Minneapolis has clearly fed into this. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, announced that 700 federal immigration agents would leave Minnesota 'immediately', leaving about 2,000 personnel in the state for now—still a heavy footprint by any normal standard. Homan framed the drawdown as the result of 'unprecedented collaboration' between local authorities and ICE, arguing that if agents can take custody of people directly from local jails, fewer officers need to be deployed on the streets.​

You can see the logic. You can also see the optics problem. If the goal is to calm the public, shifting enforcement away from sidewalks and into custody handovers may reduce viral video moments—but it doesn't address the underlying worry: who gets caught in the net, and how little recourse there is when the state is wrong.

And there is a second, quieter message in this polling: Americans are tired. Even those who want tougher immigration control often want it to look orderly, legal, and, above all, competent. The poll's movement suggests that, for a growing number of people, ICE's enforcement posture now looks less like control and more like chaos.

This puts Trump in a bind of his own making. He campaigned as the strongman of the border. But the strongman image curdles when the pictures look ugly, the protests look credible, and voters start saying—not in activist slogans, but in polling data—that the agency has 'gone too far'.

You can dismiss polls as snapshots. But when the snapshot keeps changing in the same direction, it starts to look like a trend. And trends, unlike rhetoric, have consequences.

Originally published on IBTimes UK