The wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador dominated last week’s news headlines. Prominent Democrats, of course, helped shine an even brighter spotlight on the issue by demanding his release.
But many politicians, pundits, and strategists think that Democrats are now walking into a trap. After all, immigration was a winning issue for Trump in the 2024 presidential election campaign. And most Americans have approved of his job performance in this area since he returned to the White House.
Journalist Matthew Yglesias, for example, posted the following chart from G. Elliot Morris to support that argument on X. The graph shows that Americans rate Trump’s performance on immigration much more positively than his handling of issues like the economy, inflation and trade.
Immigration wasn’t always a winning issue for Trump
Trump’s handling of immigration, however, is by no means inherently popular. His victory in 2016 might have seemed like a mandate for his restrictive views. But a backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration policies soon pushed public opinion about immigration to the left. By 2020, the share of Americans who favored increased levels of immigration (34%) surpassed the share favoring decreased levels (28%) in Gallup polling for the first time since the organization began asking the question in 1965.
As a result, Trump’s approval rating on immigration was deeply underwater throughout most of his first term. Joe Biden, in turn, had a sizable advantage over Trump on the issue in 2020, leading Trump by over 15 percentage points on the question of which candidate would do a better job of handling immigration.
Thermostatic shifts in immigration opinions
Democrats who think their party is walking into a trap by demanding Abrego Garcia’s release should take stock of how quickly immigration went from a winning issue for Biden in 2020 to one of his administration’s biggest liabilities.
In a 2024 report for the Democracy Fund, John Sides, Robert Griffin, and I showed how the public’s immigration attitudes largely followed the changing discourse over the issue during the Trump and Biden presidencies. As politicians and the media shifted from criticizing unpopular Trump-era policies like family separation to expressing concern about the record number of border crossings under Biden, the opinions of average Americans shifted in a similar way.
These dramatic swings in immigration attitudes over the past eight years dovetail with one influential account of public opinion: the thermostatic model of policy attitudes. In the thermostatic model, the public’s policy attitudes shift against the current president’s policies in response to real or perceived changes in the status quo – just like a thermostat will cool down a house when it gets too hot, or heat it up when it gets too cold.
Political scientists have long documented thermostatic patterns in voter attitudes toward government spending and programs. But for a long time, issues related to immigration did not display these thermostatic patterns. That’s no longer the case, largely because the Democratic and Republican parties themselves have changed.
With the parties pushing different immigration policies even more than in the past, the public appears to be pushing back, with their opinions moving to the left under Trump and back to the right under Biden. We, therefore, concluded our 2024 report by anticipating that future trends in immigration attitudes will be characterized by “an ebb and flow in public opinion that depends on the party of the president, the direction of policymaking, and the messages citizens receive from political leaders.”
The message matters
To be sure, this doesn’t mean that it’s wise for the opposition party to rail against all of Trump’s immigration policies. Democrats, instead, are more likely to undermine public support for his overall handling of immigration by focusing specifically on the administration’s most unpopular actions and policies.
The graph below shows that wrongful deportations and detentions fit squarely into that category. These were losing issues for the Trump administration even before Kilmar Abrego Garcia became a household name.
Large majority opposes mistakenly detaining legal residents
You can see on the left side of the chart that a clear majority of Americans surveyed in a March 2025 CBS/YouGov poll approved of the Trump administration’s program to find and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. Yet, the right side of the chart shows that 71% of Americans said that it is not acceptable if some legal U.S. residents are mistakenly detained by immigration authorities as part of the larger deportation program.
The more that Democrats can shift the frame of reference on Trump’s handling of immigration to wrongful deportations and detentions, then, the more unpopular his overall performance should become. In keeping with that contention, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 53% of Americans disapproved of the way Donald Trump is handling deportations, compared to only 42% who approved.
This is also precisely what happened when Democrats and the news media highlighted the first Trump administration’s unpopular policy of separating migrant children from their families. Or, as a 2018 Newsweek headline stated, “Donald Trump Approval Rating on Immigration Hits All-time Low [35%] Amid Family Separation Policy Outrage.”
Like family separations in 2018, the unpopularity of wrongful deportations in 2025 is poised to produce a thermostatic backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But decades of political science research on opinion leadership suggest that this will only happen if the opposition party sustains its focus on the issue.
