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There’s growing evidence that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is losing public support for its heavy-handed tactics in both detaining undocumented immigrants and cracking down on protests against the immigration sweep.
For months, the White House has pushed a narrative that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is targeting the most violent criminals for deportation and that those protesting the push are radical leftists engaging in domestic terrorism.
That narrative continued even after an ICE officer in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a white American mother of three. Trump and his officials blamed Good for her death and accused her of running over the federal agent, despite video evidence to the contrary.
In the wake of that incident, a string of polls suggested public support for the enforcement push was eroding.
The administration’s knee-jerk justification of this weekend’s fatal shooting of another American citizen protesting ICE in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti, could hardly be expected to reverse that trend.
Immigration enforcement — a campaign issue that helped propel Trump to victory in 2024 — is becoming “profoundly negative” for the president and the Republicans as a result of ICE’s tactics, says Doug Sosnik, a veteran political strategist who advised Bill Clinton during his time in the White House.
U.S. President Donald Trump signalled a shakeup in Minnesota by changing who’s in charge of immigration and customs enforcement operations in the state. The move comes after a second person, Alex Pretti, was killed by federal agents.
“This is blocking any positive narrative that the Trump administration is trying to put out about what they’re doing on behalf of the American public,” Sosnik said in an interview with CBC News.
“In the past [Trump] viewed every day that immigration was an issue was a day that he won. I think we’re at a point now where every day that immigration is an issue, he’s losing,” said Sosnik.
Some of the January polls indicating notable public opposition to the immigration enforcement push include:
- A New York Times/Siena poll found 63 per cent of registered voters — including 70 per cent of independent voters — disapproved of how ICE is handling its mission.
- A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 59 per cent of respondents saying ICE’s efforts to deal with unauthorized immigration “go too far.” The poll also found approval of Trump’s approach to immigration hit its lowest point since his return to office last January.
- A Politico/Public First poll found 34 per cent of people who voted for Trump in 2024 saying they do not support the way he is implementing the mass deportation campaign.
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington, says repeated violations of constitutional rights have led to plunging public confidence in the federal immigration enforcement push.
“I think it has turned the public against customs and border patrol,” Olson said in an interview with CBC News.
‘Probably found some way to trample it’
Olson said Americans are realizing that the incidents aren’t merely a case of particular officers making mistakes, but the result of what he calls “abusive policies” that run roughshod over rights.
“Name an area of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and by now, they’ve probably found some way to trample it,” he said.
The National takes a step-by-step look at verified videos to break down what happened before U.S. immigration and customs enforcement officers shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
For the White House, the political worry is that the ICE crackdown galvanizes Democratic voters to turn out in large numbers for the midterms this fall, putting Republican control of Congress at risk, and with it, making Trump a lame-duck president.
The political fallout could come much sooner than the midterms.
In the wake of Pretti’s shooting, Democrats in the Senate are threatening to block the latest federal funding resolution without significant reforms to ICE. That sets up the prospect of another U.S. government shutdown in a matter of days.
Monday revealed the first signs that Trump is sensing the crackdown is hurting him politically.
The president announced he’s sending his border czar Tom Homan to take charge of ICE operations on the ground in Minnesota.
Border Patrol commander Bovino sidelined
The move is being widely seen as sidelining Greg Bovino, the commander of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, in many ways the most visible face of ICE’s enforcement efforts.
“They’re recognizing what a complete disaster this operation has been,” Minneapolis City Council president Elliott Payne told CNN Monday.
Bovino is among several Trump administration officials who were quick to vilify Pretti, the ICU nurse shot to death by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday.
“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” Bovino told reporters the day of the shooting.
Mourners left tributes at the site where 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis as senior Trump administration officials continues to make claims that appear to contradict video evidence of what happened.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Pretti of domestic terrorism, claimed that he brandished a gun and attacked law enforcement officers.
Trump’s key adviser on immigration policy, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, described Pretti in a social media post as “An assassin [who] tried to murder federal agents.”
Multiple videos of the incident show no evidence that Pretti brandished the gun that he was legally permitted to carry — and in fact was tucked into his waistband behind his back. Nor is there any evidence that he attacked federal agents before they wrestled him to the pavement, then shot and killed him.
Trump’s press secretary blames Democrats
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s decision to send Homan to Minnesota will actually result in a shift in tactics.
The administration does appear, at least implicitly, to be backing down from its original characterization of Pretti’s shooting by no longer blaming him for his own death.
Instead, they’re blaming Democrats.
“This tragedy occurred as a result of a deliberate and hostile resistance by Democrat leaders in Minnesota for weeks,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told a news briefing Monday afternoon.
Leavitt accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of “spreading lies about federal law enforcement officers who are risking their lives daily to remove the worst criminal illegal aliens from our streets — murderers, rapists, pedophiles, human traffickers and gang members.”
That doesn’t sound like an administration that’s ready to admit that its immigration enforcement tactics are flawed.
On Monday, Trump spoke with Walz and Frey, describing his call with the governor as “productive” and his conversation with the mayor as “very good.”
Yet as recently as last week, Trump himself was slamming Minnesota Democrats for not co-operating with the immigration enforcement efforts and firmly pushing the claim that the ICE surge is taking violent criminals off the streets.
He spent 10 minutes of a live White House briefing leafing through photos of undocumented migrants arrested by ICE in Minnesota, holding each one up for the camera and listing off their crimes.
“Boy, these are rough characters,” Trump said. “Many, many murderers.”
Yet federal statistics from mid-November showed that 69 per cent of those held in detention after being arrested by ICE had never been convicted of any criminal offence.
ICE data obtained by the Cato Institute indicated that only five per cent of those arrested since Oct. 1, 2025 had been convicted of a violent crime.
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