Analysis: ICE is Becoming America’s Most Hated Agency
From Pew to Quinnipiac, Americans now say the masked raiding has gone too far. Meanwhile, Trump seems unaware of his steep decline in immigration favorability.
WASHINGTON — The numbers are not subtle. In February, half the country said they had a favorable view of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with only a third against. By June, that equation had collapsed (one, two): 52% unfavorable, 39% favorable, and nearly 40% saying “very unfavorable” — the political equivalent of being booed out of your own stadium.
In the August Pew survey, ICE stood in the basement of American institutions, ranked alongside the IRS as one of the least-trusted federal agencies.
For a government office built to stalk factories and airports, ICE has now become the bogeyman in polling crosstabs. Seventy-two percent of Republicans like them; thirteen percent of Democrats do. Independents — the people presidential campaigns write love letters to — disapprove by margins of nearly two-to-one.
And yet Donald Trump, the agency’s patron saint and paymaster — who tripled ICE’s budget this year to nearly $29 billion, who handed them detention camps with more beds than some state prison systems, who keeps a running ticker of deportations like home runs — has not acknowledged the agency’s free-fall in public opinion.
It’s unclear whether he even knows. So far, he hasn’t been asked. The White House hasn’t given Migrant Insider direct access to the president since July 31.
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The Backlash
ICE is deporting at record pace — more than a million since Trump retook office in January. Its raids are street theater: masked agents pulling mothers from cars, storming school parking lots, detaining children who just graduated. Fifty-four percent of Americans now say ICE has “gone too far”. Forty-five percent approve of anti-ICE protests.
On X (formerly Twitter), the backlash is louder and more viral than the defenses. Protest videos of ICE raids rack up tens of thousands of likes. Posts calling the agency “fascist” and a “hate group” drown out the loyalist clips of agents marching out contraband. The government can flood the country with agents, but it cannot win the algorithm.
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Trump’s Blind Spot
In the White House of 2025, information moves upward like incense in a cathedral: only the smoke makes it to the rafters. The man at the altar hears what flatters him, not what damns him. His aides can tell him ICE is doing “beautiful” work. They can show him Fox clips of raids revealing weapons or gang ties. What they may not tell him is that ICE is now less popular than the IRS.
Trump thrives on applause. But on ICE, the applause is fading into boos outside the Fox echo chamber. Polls show 64% of Americans want a pathway to legal status, not mass deportation. Support for abolishing ICE has climbed from 21% in late 2024 to 37% now. That’s not a fringe. That’s a movement.
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Don’t really care who it is, making fun of or exaggerating people’s bodies & faces is juvenile and encourages misogyny. Thought this would be below Migrant Insider.