President Donald Trump could soon be facing some major backlash on his immigration policies, according to an analysis from The Atlantic.
Writer Nick Miroff noted that while Trump’s poll numbers look good on immigration, the actual approval rating is “misleading.”
Citing a Pew Research Center poll, Miroff notes, “only about one-third of Americans want to see the deportation of all immigrants living in the country illegally.”
The data also shows, almost all Americans want violent criminals deported. However, “backing drops to the single digits when it comes to people who are married to a U.S. citizen or who came to the U.S. as children.”
Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, believes Trump’s slumping approval numbers are related to the “thermostatic effect of bold executive action that generates backlash."
Kustov told The Atlantic that Trump is “not doing what most people want,” and instead, the president is overreaching.
“I think there’s this tendency to assume that if people are skeptical or dislike immigration, they would just be happy with anything, but there are limits,” Kustov said. “People don’t like chaos at the border. But if you just randomly and mindlessly deport people without due process, it’s also actually pretty chaotic too.”
Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” could only worsen the overreach. Miroff believes the bill “would provide the Department of Homeland Security with tens of billions of dollars in additional funding to carry out Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.”
The writer added, “By this summer, his administration may finally have the money to scale up ICE detention facilities, hire even more private contractors, and ramp up deportation flights. This massive injection of capital is poised to arrive right at the moment the president’s political capital is slipping away.”
All these moves could give way to possible “backlash," Miroff warned.