The Data is in, and Americans Aren't Too Happy with 100 Days of Stephen Miller’s Agenda

Lots of new public polling around the 100 day mark of Trump’s second term and his vulnerability on his immigration extremism is showing

At the 100-day mark of Trump’s second term, new polling reveals widespread public rejection of the administration’s extreme immigration policies, architected by the nation’s leading white nationalist, Stephen Miller. Despite campaign promises of mass deportations, for many, there was a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. Many Americans are now reacting with increasing alarm to the practical realities of an agenda that pairs authoritarianism with nativist conspiracy theories.

The American people are witnessing, in real time, the devastating consequences of Miller’s vision: mass deportations, indefinite detentions, and the erosion of constitutional rights. Contrary to Republican claims of a popular mandate, the data show a growing backlash — one that undermines calls for capitulation to a new nationalist political order.

The Growing Backlash

Waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the RNC, Republicans were convinced their $1.2 billion investment into nativist TV ads in 2024 and their decade-long escalating dehumanizing propaganda campaign had moved the majority of Americans in alignment with Miller’s policy agenda. A CBS/YouGov poll in June 2024 found a high-water mark of 62% support for “a program to deport all undocumented immigrants,” leading many political pundits to buy the hype. And after a narrow win in November, Republicans were quick to claim a mandate for the mass deportation agenda. While there were always good reasons to doubt their claims of support, as the rubber hit the road over these last 100 days, it's clear the majority of American people are opposed to Miller’s radical agenda.

Examining support for policy positions being pushed by the Trump administration without partisan identifiers, a YouGov poll from the beginning of April found a wide rejection of the administration's major nativist interventions.

• 61% oppose “Deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned without letting them challenge the deportation in court.” A reference to the administration's effort to use the white nationalist "invasion" conspiracy theory that has itself inspired a pattern of deadly terrorist attacks to send hundreds of immigrants from Venezuela – 90% of whom had no prior criminal record – to languish indefinitely in an El Salvadoran torture prison without the ability to defend themselves in court. Even when the question is charitably framed to the administration, they are underwater (51% oppose): “Sending undocumented immigrants who are suspected of being members of a criminal group to a prison in El Salvador without a court hearing.”

• 65% oppose while only 22% support “Checking the electronic devices and social media accounts of people entering the U.S. and using what is found to disallow entry to those who have been critical of Trump administration policies.” An increasingly cross-government effort, this ‘Big Brother’ practice is weaponizing AI to track political activity online, which is starting with our immigrant neighbors but clearly won’t end there.

• 52% oppose while only 32% support “Deporting international students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests.” A reference to Mahmoud Khalil, among several other prominent examples, and the thousands of other student Visas the administration initially canceled using the AI-enhanced social media tracking before tentatively reversing the move this weekend. Meanwhile, the Washington Post-ABC News Ipsos poll found 59% oppose “Deporting international students who have criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East.

• 73% oppose “Allowing federal agents to enter homes without a warrant to search for immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.” Or ignore the law and rights of our immigrant neighbors, a practice outlined in a recently revealed secret memo issued by the Trump administration to ICE.

• The Washington Post-ABC News Ipsos poll additionally asked about “Ending birthright citizenship, under which anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen,” finding 67% in opposition to this effort to gut the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. PRRI similarly found 64% in favor of birthright citizenship.

• Additionally, the new PRRI poll found that the solid majority of Americans don’t subscribe to the replacement conspiracy theory, despite the white nationalist lie being used as the policy justification by the White House. 64% disagree with the statement “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” but 60% of Republicans agree with this bigoted lie. This has been a consistent finding over the last few years. A majority (61%) also reject the U.S. military-guarded internment camps that Miller has suggested as a part of the mass deportation plan, with a consistent (62%) of Republicans on board for the radical nativism.

This new data confirms a consistent trend: the more Americans learn about the reality of the administration’s immigration agenda, the more they reject it. But unlike the months leading up to the election, the American people are seeing and hearing about the effects of the mass deportation agenda. A New York Times/Siena poll released last week found:

• 77% have heard about “A man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador” with 61% having heard “A lot” about the story. With 52% opposing the administration's efforts with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, with 44% “strongly opposed.” An Economist/YouGov poll from mid-April found that 59% said the U.S. government is making many/some mistakes in who it is deporting. While 49% believe the Trump administration has “disobeyed court orders when deporting immigrants.” They also found that 73% do not believe Trump should have the ability to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador as the administration has repeatedly asserted it would like to do. This includes a majority of Republicans (56%) and those who approve of Trump (53%).

• Slightly less, 63% have heard a lot or some about the “detention of a Columbia University student who protested Israel.” 63% also believe that Trump should NOT have the power to “Deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel,” like Mahmoud Khalil, inducing some 34% of those who favorably approve of Trump. Only 17% of Americans believe Trump should be granted the nativist authoritarian power.

• They also find that a majority of Americans (53%) believe that Trump has “gone to far” with immigration enforcement. The Economist/YouGov poll from mid-April had a similar finding with 49% saying Trump’s approach on immigration is “too harsh,” including 12% of those who voted for Trump in 2024. While a Washington Post-ABC News Ipsos poll has 48% saying the deportations are “Going too far.”

The Mirage of Broad Support

The reaction to witnessing the authoritarian moves under the nativist agenda has flipped Trump’s overall approval rating on the issue of immigration. At the end of October, the last national New York Times/Siena poll ahead of the election had Trump 54% to Harris’ 43% on who Americans thought would do a better job on immigration. Their poll from last week saw Trump's approval rating drop to 47%. The Economist/YouGov poll has Trump's handling of immigration at a 45% approval rating.

While support for "deporting undocumented immigrants" still polls around 50%, deeper analysis reveals a critical caveat: question wording matters.

When given even the slightest bit of detail about the mass deportation agenda, support plummets. Polling from Marquette University last year repeatedly illustrated this point across three polls from May to October. Asking the question two different ways:

• “Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries?”

• “Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?”

There was a consistent 20-point flip in support when the additional promised details of the plan were given. (The May poll found 68% support when asked the first question and only 48% support when asked the second; in July the split was 64% versus 45%; and in October, there was an 18-point difference for 58% to 40%.)

Moreover, when presented as a policy option between creating pathways to citizenship and deportation, citizenship is the decisive preference of the American people. A University of Maryland poll from October found a 58% to 26% support in the match-up of the policy preferences. Similarly, Gallup found that 70% of US adults favored “allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time,” with an even broader 81% favoring a pathway to citizenship for those who were brought to the country as children.

Findings from Pew Research last month help put a finer point on this disconnect. “Roughly one-third of U.S. adults (32%) say all immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported, while 16% say none should be deported. About half (51%) say at least some should face deportation.” This is a critically important distinction that draws out the common sense and decades-long policy alignment that those who have committed violent crimes should be deported. Meanwhile, G. Elliott Morris' recent analysis in Strength in Numbers found a -37 deficit in support for deportations of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for more than 10 years and a -36 for undocumented immigrants who are parents of US citizens by birth.

The narrative that America is clamoring for mass deportation is a myth that Miller would eagerly like us all to believe.

Miller’s Radicalizing Nativist Propaganda Machine

This is where the billion-dollar nativist propaganda campaign that Miller has championed comes in. The false correlation between immigration and crime has been one of the primary dehumanizing fictions that the radical right has sought to socialize for the last half century. Under the Trump brand, Miller has helped take that lie mainstream. Miller, backed with tens of millions of dollars from Elon Musk, was a central figure in mainstreaming the radical nativist rhetoric in 2022 that helped shape the radicalized 2024 campaign. Now Miller’s aggressive shit-posting style of nativism has been wholeheartedly adopted as the official White House approach.

The administration is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars pumping out the implicit argument that immigrant equals criminal. The latest stunt, lining the front lawn of the White House with yard signs that depict individual criminals, is part of the now daily effort to advance the bigoted lie that immigrants are criminals. The idea is to dehumanize immigrants so that the American people accept or cheer-on the cruelty directed at their immigrant neighbors. But Miller’s ugly brand of nationalism isn’t very persuasive.

The massive investment in time and treasure hasn’t converted the American people to their agenda. The increase in support comes largely from the radicalization of the Republican base. A Comparison from a 2016 CNN poll to the CBS/YouGov poll found a massive 45-point swing coming from self-identified Republicans, moving from 43% in favor in 2016 to 88% in favor in 2024. Recent Pew Research found “54% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say all immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported, compared with 10% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Similarly, the New York Times/Siena poll finds 88% of Republicans support their deportation question compared to just 19% of Democrats. This radicalization is a double-edged sword. While the vilification of immigrants may increasingly motivate the GOP base, this minority is also going to be hostile to any attempt at moderation.

Part of the public’s delayed reaction stems from a failure to take Trump’s promises seriously. Polling before the election showed 30% of voters believed Trump would not follow through on mass deportations (Democrats 27%, Republicans 26%, Independents 34%). But working Americans shouldn’t suffer the blame for this misconception, it was actively cultivated by Republicans throughout the campaign. Notably, during all three nationally televised debates, when asked specifically about their mass deportation plans, Trump (twice) and Vance declined to give specifics. Meanwhile, a contingent of ‘moderate’ Republicans were actively telling the American people NOT to take the campaign promises seriously.

• “There’s all these comments on, mass deportation is gonna be, you know, grabbing all these people who are still in their legal process,” Sen. James Lankford told NOTUS in August 2024. “That’s not gonna happen because, again, a court’s gonna stop it, and the Trump administration has been through this before. They know it.”

• “Let’s see what happens,” Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar told the Tampa Bay Times in July. “I understand what you’re telling me, but I do know that sometimes, that is rhetoric you say while you’re campaigning (and) that may not happen.”

The Urgent Path Ahead

Democratic leaders also failed to sufficiently warn voters about the stakes. And the most recent efforts by Democrats to highlight the devastating cruelty towards our immigrant neighbors driving towards authoritarianism, only further illustrates that contesting and contrasting on the issue is part of a winning strategy. While the uncontested propaganda festers.

As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with Bill Kristol. Immigration is the central issue for Republicans while under the grip of neonationalism characterized by Miller’s approach. Meaning we cannot avoid it, because it will remain a central part of their attack. But it is strategically advantageous to turn an opponent's perceived strength into a vulnerability. As Kristol writes: “I believe it was Clausewitz who called attention to the importance in war of attacking and disrupting—and if possible destroying—your opponent’s center of gravity. Immigration is Trump’s political center of gravity. It’s a weaker center of gravity than one would think. Attack him there, weaken him there, and he’ll be far easier to defeat overall.”

The calls to capitulate to a neonationalist political order because of a perceived popularity shift are as bankrupt on principle as it is on strategy. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made the point this weekend in New Hampshire, calling out the “simpering timidity” of some pundits and politicians: “Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people and trans kids and immigrants instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.” We cannot win an argument we are not willing to have. But we cannot solely rely on the reactive outrage to the horrific actions metered out upon our dehumanized immigrant neighbors to anchor our counterargument. We have to go on the offensive, not just respond to authoritarian moves backed by nativist lies they are already making. We have to undermine their story by revealing that it leads to more harm, not the goods and providing a different vision that addresses the real anxieties working families feel that does not ask them to push down their neighbor to stay ahead.

The late anti-fascist Leonard Zeskind, captured this urgency best: “We must first stop their growth. Then we can further isolate the problem, and time will put them out of commission,” he wrote in the Kansas City Star in 2022. “If we don’t take the trouble to stop them, they will stop our promise of democracy. No fooling.”