PASSAIC, N.J. (AP) — Alleged gang members without criminal records wrongly sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
International students detained by masked federal agents for writing opinion columns or attending campus demonstrations.
American citizens, visa holders and visitors stopped at airports, detained for days or facing deportation for minor infractions.
Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign of immigration enforcement that's pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him. But unlike in his first term, Trump’s efforts haven't sparked the kind of widespread condemnation or protests that led him to retreat from some unpopular positions.
Instead, immigration has emerged as one of Trump’s strongest issues in public polling, reflecting his grip on the Republican base and a broader shift in public sentiment driven in part, interviews suggest, by anger at the policies of his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
The White House has seized on this shift, mocking critics and egging on Democrats to engage on an issue Trump's team sees as a win.
“America’s changed,” said pollster Frank Luntz, a longtime ally of Republicans who's been holding focus groups with voters to discuss immigration. “This is the one area where Donald Trump still has significant and widespread public support.”
A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds immigration is a relative high point for Trump compared with other issues: Slightly fewer than half of U.S. adults, 46%, say they approve of Trump’s handling of the issue, compared with his overall job approval rating of 39%.
The poll was conducted April 17-21, a period including a trip by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., to El Salvador to demand Kilmar Abrego Garcia be released from prison after the U.S. government admitted he was wrongly deported.
In the 2020 election, few voters considered immigration the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast.
Voters in the 2024 election were also more open to tougher immigration policies than the 2020 electorate. Last November, 44% of voters said most immigrants living in the United States illegally should be deported to their home countries, according to AP VoteCast, compared with 29% in 2020.
The changing views are evident in places like northern New Jersey’s suburban Passaic County, one of the former Democratic strongholds where Trump overperformed in November.
Trump became the first Republican to win the county in more than 30 years. He carried the heavily Latino city of Passaic and significantly increased his support in Paterson, the state’s third-largest city, which is majority Latino and also has a large Muslim community. He drew 13,819 votes after winning 3,999 in 2016. Having lost New Jersey by nearly 16 percentage points to Biden in 2020, Trump narrowed that margin to 6 percentage points last year.
Paterson resident Sunny Cumur, 54, a truck driver who immigrated from Turkey in the late 1990s, describes himself as a Democrat who doesn’t usually vote. But he wanted Trump to win, he said, because he was concerned about the border under Biden.
While studies show immigrants are generally less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, local news in New York and other cities frequently featured what Trump took to calling “migrant crime.”
“What Biden did, they opened all the borders and a lot of people come here for political asylum. Come on! They don't even check if they are terrorists or not," Cumur said.
“Throw ’em out. I don’t want to live with criminals,” he said.
Still, other supporters worry Trump is taking things too far.
Republican Manuel Terrero, 39, a real estate agent from Clifton, said he was drawn to Trump because of what felt like “chaos” under Biden, with too many people crossing the border and too much crime in neighboring New York.
“It shouldn’t be allowed,” said Terrero, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
Trump “is doing a lot of good things. And that is one of them, stopping the people that are coming here to create chaos. And the people that have criminal records, send them back. But I am against (deporting) the people that are working,” he said.
In 2018, border officials began separating families detained after illegally crossing the border. In some cases, children were forcibly removed from their parents under a "zero tolerance” policy, the parents sometimes deported without their kids.
Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, called the separations “tragic and heartrending" in a letter that urged Congress to act.
Bowing to pressure and concerned about the impact on the upcoming midterm elections, Trump halted the policy.
This time around, with border crossings down, Trump has shifted focus to expelling people already in the United States. He's expanding the limits of executive power and jousting with judges as he uses old laws and rarely used provisions to label hundreds of men gang members so they can be deported without being able to challenge their cases in court.
Jorge Loweree, of the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, said Trump was doing something “wholly new in historical terms.”
“We have an administration that believes they can disappear who they want, where they want, to anywhere they want,” he said.
One case that has gained traction nationally is that of Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident from El Salvador who was sent to the CECOT mega-prison despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation. Trump officials have said Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang, a claim his attorneys deny, and noted his wife once sought a protective order against him.
The White House has embraced the fight. “A request for Democrats — please continue to make defending criminal illegal immigrants your top messaging point,” wrote Trump’s director of communications, Steven Cheung.
But Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, urges Democrats to seize on the case. He says border issues are “much more nuanced than ‘immigration good for Trump, bad for Democrats'" and believes voters are on their side.
“If we can't stand up against the illegal rendition of the father of a U.S child to a prison known for torture, then I don’t really know what we’re doing,” he said.
___
Associated Press polling editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.
