Brutal New Poll Wrecks Trump’s Main Claim on ICE

Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown has gone too far, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Thursday.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had “gone too far” in enforcing immigration laws, according to the poll taken at the end of January. That number has risen by 11 points since June 2025, and is driven by Democrats and independents, whose disapproval grew by double digits.

Meanwhile, 22 percent of respondents said that the actions of federal immigration agents “are about right,” down from 26 percent in June. Only 12 percent said the agents hadn’t gone far enough.

Overall, a majority of Americans do not approve of ICE. Six in 10 respondents said that they disapprove of the job ICE is doing, while just 33 percent approved. A majority of people also believed anti-ICE demonstrators, smeared by Trump officials as agitators and insurrectionists, were acting lawfully. Nearly six in 10 respondents said that anti-ICE demonstrations around the country were mostly people acting lawfully, while 40 percent disagreed.

Speaking to NBC News’s Tom Llamas Wednesday, Trump acknowledged that immigration enforcement had a serious image problem. “What happens is that, I think we do a phenomenal job, but I don’t think we’re good at public relations,” he said.

But that’s classic Trump, more concerned with what something looks like than what it actually is. And what his administration has committed is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing carried out by an untrained, extrajudicial gestapo imbued with “federal immunity”—something that doesn’t actually exist.

The surging disapproval for ICE comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown in Minnesota that has seen hundreds of immigrants violently torn from their communities, and left two U.S. citizens dead. Trump and his administration officials smeared the citizens killed by federal agents and have since refused to apologize.

It seems that Republicans either don’t care about federal agents terrorizing an American city or perhaps they’re observing some alternative universe.

According to the NPR/PBS/Marist poll, 73 percent of Republicans said they approved of the job ICE was doing, and 77 percent said they believed ICE was making Americans safer. Seventy-five percent of Republicans said they believed that most anti-ICE demonstrations were people acting unlawfully.

Tulsi Gabbard somehow thinks that there is a matter of national security involving voting machines in Puerto Rico.

Reuters reports that the director of national intelligence sent a team to the U.S. territory in May to investigate voting machines as part of claims that Venezuela hacked them. The investigation ultimately did not produce any evidence for that claim, unnamed sources told the publication.

Gabbard’s office confirmed the investigation to Reuters, but denied it had any links to Venezuela, claiming that its purpose was to uncover vulnerabilities in voting machines there. Her team seized some of the machines and voting machine data as part of the investigation, calling it “standard practice in forensics analysis.”

“[The office of the director of national intelligence] found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections,” the office said in a statement.

President Trump can’t let the 2020 election go, insisting that he actually won and that Democrats used fraud to steal it away. Gabbard appears to be his point person on trying to manufacture evidence for these claims, going to Georgia to seize 2020 ballots and sending her employees to Puerto Rico to seize machines. The end goal of the Trump administration remains unclear, but the president has expressed his wish to take over elections across the country.

The Democrats are folding on their demand that federal agents stop covering their faces with masks while making arrests.

After demanding ICE and other federal agents be banned from wearing face coverings, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to fight for less, adding caveats and loopholes to their mask stances during a press conference on Wednesday.

“No secret police. I find it amazing that the Speaker of the House [thinks] they should be allowed to have masks,” Schumer said. “They need identification and no masks, except in extraordinary and unusual circumstances.”

“There are several demands that we will articulate on behalf of the American people,” Jeffries said. “Certainly, I think there’s agreement that no masks should be deployed in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, as has been the case, horrifying the American people.”

In what “extraordinary and unusual circumstances” would these masked militiamen be justified in hiding their identities? They are federal officers who are in quiet suburbs and city streets alike, going door to door and kidnapping, brutalizing, and killing people along the way. And how exactly does Jeffries think that ICE can wear masks in a manner that isn’t arbitrary or capricious?

Above all, this is yet another confusing concession from a party whose base is desperately starving for its leaders to do something, anything, to stop the Trump administration from continuing to enact terror in their communities. Jeffries and Schumer are once again appealing to the GOP’s good faith and honesty—a move that has yet to actually work for them.

The president believes he has a “right” to use the Justice Department as his own personal law firm.

Speaking at the 74th National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning, Donald Trump seemed to think that criticism of his intent to abuse the executive branch was all one big joke.

“And then they say, ‘Donald Trump is using the Justice Department to get even,’” Trump parroted through his teeth. “And I don’t. But wouldn’t I have a right to?

“Think of it. There’s never been a president in history treated the way I got treated,” he added.

But Trump does not have a right to utilize the DOJ for his personal whims. In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Attorney General Griffin Bell laid out new bedrock principles in order to prevent the agency’s independence from crumbling under the pressure of the White House.

They included new procedures and principles to prevent partisan interests from influencing legal judgements, safeguards to protect the DOJ’s “neutral zone,” and assurances that the department’s attorneys “must always be committed to good judgment and integrity,” according to the Brenner Center for Justice.

And yet the agency has tossed out decades of precedent since Trump returned to office last year thanks to the stewardship of its leader, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has bent and capitulated to Trump and his whims at practically every turn.

Earlier this week, Justice Department officials began daily meetings to reignite efforts to investigate and punish government officials that played a role in investigating Trump prior to his return to the White House, meeting under the banner of Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group.”

The group was designed to challenge former special counsel Jack Smith and his staff, as well as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The initiative would also target any officials that attempted to hold Trump accountable in the wake of the January 6 attack.

After concluding that his administration needed a “softer touch” on immigration, President Donald Trump delivered remarks Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast that quickly devolved into a wildly racist tirade against immigrants.

“We have to get the bad ones out,” Trump said, claiming that immigrants were a threat to innocent churchgoers. “You can’t have people going to churches and coming out and have criminals taking advantage, and doing things that nobody even wants to describe.”

Trump claimed his immigration enforcement crackdown in Washington, D.C., had removed scores of “monsters” from the streets. “We took out over 2,000 hardcore criminals. You know, two percent of the population produces 90 percent of the violent crime,” he said.

In reality, federal data suggests that more than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in response to Trump’s so-called “crime emergency” in Washington had no prior criminal records at all, which is part of a broader national trend of targeting law-abiding immigrants.

To illustrate his point, Trump claimed that he’d single-handedly saved the capital’s restaurant industry. “The restaurant would be robbed with people sitting there. ‘Hold up your hands, everybody! Give us your money!’ And then they’d whack people with the butt of a gun,” he said.

Trump also openly mocked Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for urging Trump to abide by the U.S. Constitution in his lawless crackdown in Minnesota.

“‘This is the Constitution of the United States’—People don’t want to be mugged!” Trump cried. “They don’t want to have a murderer living next door that was, you know, killed three people in a certain country and is now living beautifully here. Because generally speaking, if they’ve killed in another country, they’re not gonna be the best of citizens.

“These are some of the meanest, most vicious people. They only gave us the worst,” Trump said, before turning to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had once offered to take “homegrown” American citizens Trump wanted to deport.

“He’s sent us a few. I don’t want to talk to him about it,” Trump joked. “But he sends us some real bad ones.

“Isn’t it true that you will not send your good people to the United States? Wouldn’t you say? Look at him, he doesn’t know. He said, ‘What’s going on here?’ But no, he sends bad people to the United States,” Trump said.

Trump couched his criticism by saying that South American and Latin American leaders were “streetwise” in their supposed decisions about what citizens to keep and who to send away—which among other things, is definitely not how immigration works. “They cherish their good people, they only send us their bad people,” he said.

Trump’s fearmongering about immigrants is not only wildly racist—it’s also anti-Christian, going against the very Bible he hawks to his followers.

Leviticus 19:32-34 states, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”