Public shift on immigration paves way to US crackdown

Passaic, N.J. Apr. 26: Alleged gang members without criminal records wrongly sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador. International students detained by masked federal agents for writing opinion columns or attending campus demonstrations.

American citizens, visa holders and visitors stopped at airports, detained for days or facing deportation for minor infractions. Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him. 

But unlike in his first term, Trump's efforts have not sparked the kind of widespread condemnation or protests that led him to retreat from some unpopular positions. Instead, immigration has emerged as one of Trump's strongest issues in public polling, reflecting both his grip on the Republican base and a broader shift in public sentiment that is driven in part, interviews suggest, by anger at the policies of his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.

The White House has seized on this shift, mocking critics and egging on Democrats to engage on an issue that Trump's team sees as a win.

In the 2020 election, few voters considered immigration the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of registered voters in all 50 states.

Four years later, after Republicans and conservative media had hammered Biden for his policies and often cast migrant U.S.-Mexico border crossings as an invasion, immigration had risen above health care, abortion and crime. It was second only to the economy.

Under Biden, migrant apprehensions spiked to more than 2 million two years in a row. Republican governors in border states bused migrants by the tens of thousands to cities across the country, including to New York, where migrants were placed in shelters and hotels, straining budgets.

Immigration remains a relative strength for Trump today: 84% of Republicans approve of Trump's immigration approach, according to the April AP-NORC poll, compared with 68% who approve of how he is handling trade negotiations.

The poll found about 4 in 10 U.S. adults "strongly" or "somewhat" favor Trump's policy of sending Venezuelan immigrants who authorities say are gang members to El Salvador, with an additional 22% saying they neither favor nor oppose it. About 4 in 10 were opposed.

Americans are more opposed, broadly, to revoking foreign students' visas over their participation in pro-Palestinian activism, with about half opposed and about 3 in 10 in support.

The changing views are evident in places like northern New Jersey's suburban Passaic County, one of the former Democratic strongholds where Trump overperformed in November.

While studies show immigrants are generally less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, local news in New York and other cities frequently featured what Trump took to calling "migrant crime."

One of his first actions in office was to impose a travel ban barring the entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. That caused chaos at airports and protests across the nation. 

The policy was quickly blocked by the courts, forcing his administration to offer three broader iterations, the last of which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.

Images of children held in cages at border facilities and audio recordings of young children crying for their parents drew intense backlash, with thousands participating in hundreds of marches across the country. 

The protesters included soon-to-be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who was photographed in 2018 breaking down outside a facility in Texas being used to detain migrant children.

Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, called the separations "tragic and heartrending" in a letter that urged Congress to act. "This disgraceful condition must end," he wrote.

Bowing to pressure and concerned about the impact on the upcoming midterm elections, Trump halted the policy. This time around, with border crossings down, Trump has shifted focus to expelling people already in the United States. 

He is expanding the limits of executive power and jousting with judges as he uses old laws and rarely used provisions to label hundreds of men gang members so they can be deported without being able to challenge their cases in court.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who as a senator once tried to negotiate a bipartisan immigration package — has moved to expel people in the U.S. legally over political beliefs he deems counter to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Their targets have included hundreds of students and others with legal status, including those on student visas or holding green cards conferring permanent residency, as well as those who have sought asylum using legal channels.

Jorge Loweree, of the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, said Trump was doing something "that's wholly new in historical terms."

"It's critical that people understand what the administration is doing," said Loweree, the council's managing director of programs and strategy. "We have an administration that believes they can disappear who they want, where they want, to anywhere they want."

Few elected Republicans are speaking out, though some of Trump's outside allies have criticized what they see as overreach.

Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host who endorsed Trump late in the campaign, voiced alarm at the case of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela with no criminal record who was among those sent to El Salvador's maximum-security CECOT prison.

It found Americans split on mass deportations, with about 4 in 10 in favor of deporting all immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and a similar share opposed. 

Still, about one-third of U.S. adults say Trump's actions have been "about right" on immigration, and about 2 in 10 think he hasn't gone far enough.

El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, has said he will not let Abrego Garcia leave the country.(AP)