Immigration is turning into a disaster for Trump

POLL: Nobody believes the official story in Minneapolis

Demonstrators protest ICE operations and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on Jan. 25, 2026, in Minneapolis. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about education and parenting, the lingering politics of Covid-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

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The Minneapolis immigration raids have been a complete and unmitigated disaster for the Trump administration.

Our latest poll, fielded in the days after the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by immigration enforcement officers (Jan. 26 to 27, 2026) revealed a distrusting public increasingly souring on the administration’s handling of Minneapolis. Renee Good and Pretti’s deaths at the hands of immigration officials have turned what used to be Trump’s strongest issue — immigration — into one of his biggest immediate liabilities.

The trillion-dollar question in politics is always “Who will voters blame?”. That’s why senior administration officials have tried desperately to push the narrative that Pretti’s death was a justified killing. Senior administration officials have baselessly called Pretti an “assassin,” and dozens of Trump’s allies have spent the last few days arguing that local police, state and local Democrats, and antifa were all to blame for the recent chaos in Minnesota.

We were skeptical that the public would fall for this story, but to be sure, we decided to poll the question.

When asked who they blame most for the Minneapolis shooting, 54% of voters picked either Donald Trump or immigration enforcement officials. Meanwhile, just 34% pinned the blame on anti-ICE protestors and Democratic officials in Minnesota.

Moreover, it’s clear that the public doesn’t trust its government to tell it the truth, so the administration’s ability to persuade voters to their version of events is limited.

That’s why nobody is buying Stephen Miller’s “don’t believe your lying eyes” approach. In fact, one of the few things that Americans can agree on is that the available bystander recordings are, by some distance, the most trustworthy source of information on what really happened. Fifty-seven percent of voters refuse to trust Trump or DHS/ICE leadership on the topic, but an overwhelming supermajority believe that bystander recordings are a reliable source of information.

And the videos don’t leave much room for interpretation on what really happened.

What makes this so dangerous for the Trump administration is that both shootings were caught on videos that have found their way to the vast majority of the public. Eighty-two percent of people report having seen at least one of the shootings.

Voters support defunding ICE, maybe even abolishing it

So it’s clear that voters are mad and that they blame Trump and his administration for the current situation. But what do they want?

For starters, they want the immigration raids in Minneapolis to stop. By a margin of 21 points, voters believe that ICE should leave Minneapolis.

Voters also want some restrictions placed on the agency, which has operated with carte blanche in the second Trump administration. With a budget deadline rapidly approaching, ICE is slated to receive an additional $10 billion in funding under the current proposal.

But 49% of voters believe that Congress should refuse to provide funding for the agency in the upcoming budget without some kind of reform to the agency, even if that risks a shutdown. Meanwhile, just 39% of voters support avoiding a shutdown if it means funding ICE with no additional strings attached.

But it goes even further than just preferring a shutdown: “Abolish ICE,” for so long a radioactive statement among everyone but the most committed Democrats, now polls above water for the first time in recent memory — 48% of voters support the call to abolish ICE, while 45% oppose it.

This is a stunning turnaround from the Biden era, where 66% of voters opposed “Abolish ICE” as recently as September 2024, per Civiqs’ tracking data,, with just 20% supporting it. It’s also an extremely new sentiment — even during the first Trump administration, Civiqs’ data indicated that support barely cracked 30%. Put simply, this is perhaps the most anti-ICE the public has ever been.

Why? I think the answer is simple: Right now, the Trump administration’s approach on immigration is blamed for one of the most disliked things in American politics: chaos. And when something that’s supposed to maintain order begins to devolve into chaos, a lot of voters want change.

This has also resulted in ICE reaching extremely high levels of unpopularity, with 61% of voters having an unfavorable opinion of the agency, and just 35% having a favorable opinion of some kind.

The bad news for Republicans doesn’t stop with the awful public perception. The evidence would suggest that this is also firing up Democrats even further, widening an asymmetric enthusiasm gap between the parties. Democrats now lead Republicans by 4 points on the generic ballot among all registered voters, but this lead grows to 10 points when limited to voters who say they’re “definitely” or “probably” going to vote in 2026.

That is the widest enthusiasm gap we have seen in our entire set of surveys. Troublingly for Republicans, this also aligns with the special election results from this week, where Democrats won a Harris +71 St. Paul district by 91 points.

Methodology

Our poll was fielded between Jan. 26 and 27, 2026, and surveyed 1,515 registered voters across the nation. The sample was weighted to be representative of the universe of registered voters in the United States by race; age; gender; education; census region; race by gender; age by gender; race by education; modeled presidential partisanship by age, education and gender; and 2024 vote choice. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The design effect of the survey, which measures the loss of statistical precision due to weighting and design, was 1.17. Accounting for the design effect, the full margin of error was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

This survey was designed and weighted by The Argument. Data collection was performed by Verasight, and voter file data and weighting targets were obtained from Catalist. A full methodology statement is available on the last page of the survey PDF. A detailed explanation on how our surveys work is available here.

Thanks to Josh Kalla, Amanda Iovino, Guy Molyneaux, Charlotte Swasey, and Carroll Doherty for reviewing this month’s polling language. As part of The Argument’s polling advisory committee, these experts have provided comments to ensure the rigor and objectivity of this polling project. They are not responsible for the ultimate language choices made by The Argument, and all errors are our own.