The People Turn on Trump’s Secret Police

Public support for ICE has collapsed in Trump's second term.

WASHINGTON — The woman’s name was Renee Good and she is dead now, shot on a street in Minneapolis by federal agents who came looking for somebody else. This was on January 7. The same day, a polling company called YouGov asked Americans what they thought about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Fifty-two percent said they disapproved of how ICE does its job. Fifty-one percent said the agency uses too much force. Only 39 percent approved.

The poll was in the field when the agents killed her. The numbers will get worse, because the agency is bullshit.

One year ago, in February 2025, ICE had a net approval rating of plus-16. Americans liked the agency. They wanted the border controlled. They voted for Trump to do it. By January 2026, ICE’s approval had collapsed to minus-13. That is a 30-point swing in public opinion in twelve months. You don’t see numbers move like that unless something has gone very wrong.

This is what happens when you build prisons in alligator swamps and send masked men into neighborhoods to grab people. Trump won in 2024 because Americans wanted somebody to do something about the border. They did not vote for Alligator Alcatraz. They did not vote for federal agents in balaclavas operating like a junta. They wanted order. They got ICE.

Now they want ICE gone.

Support for abolishing the agency entirely hit 42 percent by January, up from 19 percent in August 2024. Abolishing ICE used to be something Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that made people nervous. Now it polls better than most members of Congress. Independents moved 15 points toward abolition in a single year. Among Democrats, 69 percent now support dismantling the agency. Even Republicans moved six points. You know you’ve lost the room when your own party starts backing away.

The second term was supposed to be the deportation triumph. Trump promised he would clear the country of criminals and gang members and terrorists sneaking across in caravans. What Americans got instead was workplace raids that rounded up dishwashers and construction workers—54 percent of Americans disapprove of those raids. They got agents hauling people out of schools and hospitals—52 percent oppose that. They got deportations to third countries where the detained person isn’t even from—64 percent oppose that. They got a detention center in the Florida wetlands surrounded by alligators and crocodiles, an actual facility they actually built where detainees can look out and see reptiles that would eat them if they tried to run.

The Brookings Institution, which does not traffic in hysteria, reported that 54 percent of Americans think ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws. That’s a majority. By July 2025, 51 percent disapproved of Trump’s entire deportation program. Pew found 53 percent think Trump is doing too much on deportations. KFF and the New York Times surveyed immigrant voters and found 59 percent disapprove of how ICE does its job.

These are not soft numbers. The share of Americans with a strongly unfavorable view of ICE doubled in one year—from 19 percent in February 2025 to 40 percent by January 2026. That’s not people who are kind of annoyed. That’s people who are angry.

The partisan breakdown tells you where this is headed. Republicans still support ICE at 80 percent. Democrats oppose it at 85 percent. But independents—the people who decide elections—disapprove at 56 percent. Independents gave Trump his victory in 2024. Now a majority of them have turned against his signature enforcement agency.

And there are cracks even inside the Republican coalition. Forty-five percent of Republicans think ICE agents should have to show identification when they’re arresting people. Forty percent think immigrants deserve due process. A third oppose enforcement in schools and hospitals. These are not big numbers, but they are not zero. When a third of your own party starts questioning whether federal agents should operate in masks without warrants, you have a problem.

Trump keeps insisting the people love ICE. The people do not love ICE. The people are scared of ICE. Latinos told Pew that 59 percent of them have seen ICE conducting raids or arrests in their neighborhoods. Immigrants told KFF that 41 percent worry they or a family member could be detained or deported. Among undocumented immigrants, that number is 75 percent. Three out of four people living in fear of agents who might show up and take them.

This is the immigration crackdown a majority of the country now says is too much.

The polling shows something else. Americans know the difference between enforcement and cruelty. They know the difference between deporting criminals and deporting everyone. They know the difference between immigration policy and what ICE became under Trump’s second term: an unaccountable force in masks that shoots women in the street.

Renee Good was 37 years old. She was a mother. She had just dropped her daughter at school when ICE agents showed up hunting for someone else in her neighborhood. She is the face of what polls have been showing for months. The crackdown went too far, too fast, with too much force. The country noticed. The approval numbers collapsed. The majority turned.

Trump built this. He campaigned on it. He sent ICE into cities with military backup and National Guard deployments. He proposed sending detainees to prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, Libya. He built the alligator prison. He sent the masked agents. He turned ICE into the thing Americans now say they want abolished.

The woman’s name was Renee Good. Remember it. Because her death crystallized what the polling already showed: the country wanted immigration enforcement. What it got was ICE.

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