How ICE Lost Middle America (Analysis)
With 60% of Americans now disapproving of ICE, the movement to dismantle or deeply reform the agency has moved from the activist fringe to the center of the 2026 political landscape.
ANALYSIS: The political tide has clearly shifted against ICE in public opinion and in parts of the political class, but the agency and the broader enforcement apparatus remain deeply entrenched and still enjoy strong support on the right. What is emerging is not the imminent dismantling of ICE, but a live, asymmetric fight in which pro‑migrant mobilization and skepticism of “secret police” tactics are now mainstream forces shaping elections, budgets, and street politics.
Where things stand in early 2026
The current DHS funding crisis comes after Congress allowed annual appropriations for Homeland Security to lapse in mid‑February 2026, triggering a partial shutdown of the department. Because immigration enforcement is classified as an “essential” public safety function and many operations are fee‑funded or pre‑appropriated, ICE and CBP field operations continue even as oversight units, administrative staff, and some coordination functions are furloughed.
What is politically new is that Democrats are now willing to risk a DHS shutdown to constrain ICE and CBP, rather than simply bargaining over how much to expand them. Senate Democrats have said openly they will not fund DHS without “guardrails” on immigration enforcement, such as stricter warrant requirements, bans on masked agents in the field, and limits on roving patrols, while the White House and its allies accuse them of “shutting down DHS until we cease enforcing immigration laws.”
Public opinion: ICE loses the middle
Across Trump’s second term, especially after the Minneapolis killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal agents, polling shows a decisive shift among independents and some Republicans away from ICE’s current tactics. A February 2026 Marist survey finds 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the job ICE is doing, with only about one‑third approving. In the same poll, roughly two‑thirds (65 percent) say ICE has gone “too far” in enforcing immigration laws, up from 54 percent the previous summer.
That pattern is echoed across outlets. A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll similarly reports that nearly two‑thirds believe ICE has “gone too far,” and about six in ten disapprove of its performance, with disapproval especially strong among Democrats and independents. A Fox News poll—hardly a hostile venue—finds 59 percent of voters now describe ICE as “too aggressive,” up ten points since July 2025, including sharp increases among independents, moderates, and even non‑MAGA Republicans.
Crucially for the “tide turning” claim, this is not just about abstract dislike; it is about willingness to curtail or abolish the agency. Support for abolishing ICE has roughly doubled since 2018, from 18 percent to 36 percent overall in Fox’s trend, with particularly large jumps among white voters, women, independents, and Democrats. A YouGov poll after the Minneapolis shootings finds 48 percent of American adults—and nearly one in five Republicans—now favor abolishing ICE outright.
Trump’s second‑term immigration politics
Immigration and mass deportation helped power Trump’s return to the White House in 2024, when six in ten voters told Pew it was a “very important” issue for their vote. In the early months of his second term, “border security” remained his strongest issue, with majority approval even as his broader immigration approval lagged. But as the interior crackdown intensified and the deaths of U.S. citizens like Good and Pretti went viral, approval on immigration has fallen into the 30s, with disapproval solidly in the 50s.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll after the Minneapolis shootings finds only 39 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, the lowest mark since he returned to office, while 53 percent disapprove. Even among Republicans, about one in five now say federal immigration agents have “overstepped” in their enforcement actions. AP‑NORC similarly reports that around six in ten Americans think Trump has gone too far in deploying federal immigration agents in U.S. cities, while only about a third view ICE favorably—roughly the same low favorability the agency had back in 2018, despite years of Republican messaging.
So the core MAGA base still backs the crackdown, but the coalition that made immigration a winning wedge in 2024 is fraying at the edges. Independents, suburban voters, and younger Republicans are increasingly uncomfortable not with the concept of enforcement, but with visible, lethal, militarized tactics associated with ICE’s interior operations.
Scale and character of the street uprising
On the streets, the country is seeing a level of confrontation with federal immigration agents that goes well beyond earlier immigrant‑rights marches. After Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, at least 1,000 events were organized nationwide for an “ICE Out For Good” weekend of action, with protests in cities across the country chanting “ICE out now!” and directly targeting the agency’s local presence.
In the weeks that followed, more than 300 anti‑ICE protests were held across the United States in a single day, from New York and Washington, D.C., to Tucson, with tens of thousands in the streets and some participants joining a coordinated general strike. Separate reporting describes roughly 250 demonstrations in 46 states under the slogan “No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE,” explicitly linking daily economic activity to the agency’s budget and legitimacy.
Longer‑term, these mobilizations sit atop broader “No Kings” protests that one account estimates have “mobilized millions in recent months” against both Trump’s mass‑deportation push and his broader authoritarian turn. On the ground, communities are organizing whistle networks to warn neighbors when ICE arrives, surrounding agents’ vehicles to block arrests, and documenting raids via social media in real time, creating a highly visible, multi‑ethnic culture of civil resistance. Polls show that a solid majority of Americans—around 59 percent in one NPR/Marist survey—view these anti‑ICE demonstrations as mostly legitimate rather than unlawful.
The DHS shutdown as inflection point
The DHS shutdown fight has become a proxy referendum on whether ICE’s current model of interior enforcement is politically sustainable. Rather than simply haggling over topline dollar figures, Democrats are demanding structural constraints: tighter warrant requirements, transparency about which agents are conducting field operations, and bans on roving, masked patrols in unmarked vehicles. Republicans, invoking security and rule of law, accuse them of using the appropriations process to “weaken enforcement and undermine DHS and ICE” and warn of national security risks.
Operationally, a partial DHS shutdown does not halt ICE; enforcement, detention, and border operations continue, while immigration courts, oversight offices, data management, training, and coordination functions are disrupted. That combination creates backlogs, weakens internal accountability, and can actually make abuses harder to monitor even as raids proceed. Politically, however, the mere fact that a major party is now prepared to shut down large swaths of the federal government rather than write ICE another blank check is a significant break from the bipartisan posture of the 2000s and 2010s.
In media framing, mainstream outlets increasingly describe Trump as being in an “impossible situation” on ICE: still popular on “border security” as an abstraction, but facing broad opposition to how ICE actually operates in American neighborhoods. That dynamic is exactly what gives leverage to a pro‑migrant, anti‑ICE movement: it can frame itself as pro‑rule‑of‑law and pro‑community safety against an agency widely seen as lawless and destabilizing.
Politicians caught on the wrong side
The clearest “out‑of‑touch” examples so far are Democrats who tried to split the difference—voting to fund ICE while voicing rhetorical concern—and now find themselves facing primary threats and base fury. In January, only seven House Democrats voted for a DHS spending bill that included roughly $10 billion for ICE; those members, including Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez, Jared Golden, Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen, Don Davis, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, were immediately targeted by activists and commentators calling for them to be primaried.
Several of these Democrats had supported tough‑on‑crime measures like the Laken Riley Act just a year earlier, but after the killings in Minneapolis they reversed course, arguing that ICE had “openly disregarded our Constitution and laws” and that they could not “in good conscience” give the agency more money without robust oversight. Their about‑face underscores how quickly the political ground has moved: what looked like safe “law and order” positioning in 2025 now looks like complicity in abuses to activist constituencies and many primary voters.
On the Republican side, there are growing cracks between Trump loyalists and more vulnerable or institutionally minded conservatives. After the Minneapolis shootings and viral video of agents killing U.S. citizens, prominent Republicans such as Senator Bill Cassidy and House Homeland Security Chair Andrew Garbarino publicly called for investigations, hearings, and even the relocation of ICE personnel out of Minneapolis, reflecting anxiety about being tied too closely to visible abuses. Strategists quoted in Reuters warn that Trump’s immigration tactics—once an electoral asset—are now a liability that could cost Republicans the midterms if backlash in the center and suburbs hardens.
Perhaps the starkest misstep came from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who initially portrayed one of the Minneapolis shootings as justified and implied the victim posed a serious threat, only to have video evidence and public reaction force her to retreat from those claims. Commentators in swing‑state media note that this kind of reflexive defense of lethal force by federal agents, followed by an embarrassing walk‑back, feeds a narrative of an administration and party out of touch with basic standards of accountability.
“Secret police” dynamics and authoritarian drift
What fuels talk of a “secret police” is not only brutality, but the visible architecture of militarized immigration enforcement. Reporting on Trump’s mass‑deportation campaign describes the deployment of masked ICE and DHS agents in combat gear, often in unmarked vehicles, to Democratic‑leaning cities, backed by National Guard support and empowered to conduct dragnet stops based on racial profiling. Congress has already authorized roughly $170 billion for DHS to scale up this mega‑campaign, which includes quotas to deport around a million undocumented workers per year and permissive standards that have swept up U.S. citizens as well.
Civil‑liberties analysts warn that this infrastructure could easily be repurposed for broader political control: stationing agents near polling places, demanding citizenship checks at the ballot box, and using immigration raids in opposition strongholds as a form of intimidation. That is why so much of the anti‑ICE rhetoric explicitly links the agency to “authoritarian” or “fascist” practices; it reflects a fear that normalized exception powers against migrants can be turned against dissent more generally.
The public seems to be internalizing at least part of this critique. Majorities now say ICE is making Americans less safe, not more, and polls show a sharp partisan split on whether deploying federal agents to cities enhances or undermines security, with Democrats and independents increasingly in the latter camp. That perception of insecurity created by the enforcers is central to the pro‑migrant, anti‑ICE narrative and makes it harder for politicians to hide behind “law and order” language without answering for specific abuses.
Implications of millions confronting ICE
The combination of mass protest and localized obstruction of enforcement has several concrete implications for policy and politics.
On the ground, community resistance raises the cost, visibility, and risk of interior raids. When neighbors surround ICE vehicles, blow whistles, and flood social media with footage, agents either escalate—using pepper spray, tear gas, and more militarized tactics—or retreat, both of which feed the narrative that the agency is behaving like an occupying force rather than a normal law‑enforcement body. Over time, this kind of resistance tends to push enforcement into less visible domains—databases, detention contracts, quiet transfers—while eroding the legitimacy of door‑knock raids and street dragnets.
Legally and institutionally, sustained protest and public opinion are already reshaping the bargaining space in Washington. House and Senate Democrats now feel they have political cover—even obligation—from their voters to block ICE funding unless paired with strong oversight and limits, and a nontrivial minority of Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from the harshest tactics. State and local actors, from sanctuary‑city mayors to attorneys general, are more willing to refuse cooperation with ICE detainers and to litigate aggressively against federal overreach, knowing that national polls show the public divided or skeptical about ICE’s methods.
Electorally, immigration enforcement is shifting from a unifying wedge for Republicans to a polarizing, high‑risk issue. Democrats see an opportunity to run not just as defenders of immigrants, but as defenders of civil liberties for citizens and non‑citizens alike against an unpopular, overreaching federal force. Republicans who cling to maximalist “back the agents no matter what” rhetoric risk being cast as defenders of lawless state violence, especially in suburban districts where voters may favor border control in the abstract but recoil from images of masked agents killing Americans.
Is the tide really turning against ICE?
Taken together, the data and events support the claim that the national political and policy tide is moving against ICE’s current model of interior enforcement. Majorities now say the agency has gone too far, disapprove of its performance, and view protests against it as legitimate; support for outright abolition has entered the mainstream, especially among Democrats and independents, and is no longer negligible among Republicans. The DHS funding showdown, primary threats to ICE‑friendly Democrats, and visible GOP discomfort after Minneapolis all indicate that elite incentives are catching up to these shifts.
Yet there are hard limits. ICE and CBP are backed by large statutory authorities, multi‑year funding, and a Republican Party whose base still overwhelmingly supports tough enforcement and opposes abolition. Even in shutdown conditions, the machinery of detention and deportation keeps grinding on, often with weaker oversight. The more apt framing is that a broad, multi‑class, multi‑racial pro‑migrant, anti‑ICE movement has finally forced a contested equilibrium: ICE is no longer politically untouchable, and politicians who ignore that reality increasingly find themselves exposed—but the struggle over whether it becomes a normalized “secret police” arm of the state or is fundamentally constrained and reimagined is very much still underway.
3:24am Pablo posting. It occurred to me long before 5:16am that it’s time to drag Senator James Langford to the rostrum. He negotiated the 2024 Answer which Trump torpedoed. Lidia will get Jimmy to talk.