New poll: Voters would pause deportations to lower housing, food prices
Trump's State of the Union address was largely about crime and immigration. Our poll shows voters wanted to hear less about immigration policy and more about how he's going to bring down prices
This article uses data from the February 2026 Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted February 18-20 among 1,566 U.S. adults. The margin of error is +/- 2.5 percentage points. See the full poll release and methodology for details.
Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address last night to a country that thinks he’s focused on the wrong things. A CNN survey released in January found that most voters believed Trump had the wrong priorities, and 55% said his first year back in office was a failure.
Additionally, our new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, released on Feb. 24, found that 48% of voters said prices or the economy were the most important problem facing the country today. And another new poll released this week by Unite Here1, a labor union, found 69% of voters believe Trump is focusing too much on deportations and not enough on the cost of living.
However, according to NBC News Trump spent just two minutes of his speech talking about affordability. That was roughly the same amount of time he spent praising the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, one-third the time he spent on crime, and one-fourth the time he spent on national security.
I also ran a text content analysis on a transcript of Trump’s speech, and calculated that he spent just 13% of it talking about prices, affordability, and health care combined. In comparison, he spent 24% of his SOTU address on immigration, including deportations and mentions of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, and 20% on foreign policy. The president spent the rest on a grab-bag of other policies, including tariffs, or giving medals to people. The president did not mention the Epstein files.
Trump built his 2024 campaign for president on a promise to lower the cost of living for the average American “on day one.” Using brand-new question wording to tap into voters’ priorities for government spending, our February Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll indicates voters think he’s not doing enough to keep his promises. Voters indicate the president is focusing too much attention on deportations, and would redirect government resources to efforts to reduce the cost of housing, food, health care, and Social Security if given the choice.
Several recent studies have found Trump’s mass deportations program could cost the U.S. hundreds of billions annually in lost productivity and labor, lower spending, and lower tax revenues (which harms government investment).
Our latest survey also reveals voters are concerned that deportations could lead to higher prices of goods produced in industries with higher shares of immigrant employees. Americans also disapprove of the government denying unauthorized immigrants a hearing with a judge before being deported.
How Americans weigh economics and immigration
Our first results shed light on how Americans weigh concerns about immigration against economics and the cost of living. We gave voters a forced choice question: Would you rather have the government focus on deporting unauthorized immigrants even if it leads to higher prices for agricultural goods and housing, or pause deportations to keep prices lower? Overall, 49% said they’d rather pause deportations, while just 35% said they would continue deportations even if it meant prices would rise.
When breaking down respondents by party, independents say by a 2:1 margin, 50% to 23%, that they would want the president to pause his deportations policy if it were having economic impacts.
Among voters earning less than $50,000 a year — the voters most exposed to rising grocery bills — 52% chose pausing deportations, versus just 26% who’d accept higher prices to continue enforcement. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, with whom Trump made major inroads in 2024, the margin balloons to 47 points: 68% chose lower prices, just 21% chose deportations. Even among seniors — the age group generally most favorable to immigration enforcement in our poll — the result was essentially a tie at 46% for continued deportations and 45% for pausing.
An analysis by the immigration advocacy group FWD.us estimated that deporting one million workers per year — combined with expiring work permits and cuts to legal immigration — would raise food prices by 14.5% and construction costs by 6.1%. And those price increases are already showing up. According to BLS data compiled by the American Immigration Council, agriculture lost 155,000 workers — 7% — between March and July 2025, compared to a 2.2% increase in the same period the year before. Wholesale vegetable prices surged 38.9% from June to July 2025, the biggest summer spike since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them in 1947.
So we asked voters directly: How concerned are you that deportations could lead to higher prices for groceries and housing?
Concerned: 59% (36% very concerned, 23% somewhat concerned)
Not concerned: 32% (17% not very concerned, 15% not at all)
Not sure: 9%
Nearly six in ten Americans are worried that deportations are making their groceries more expensive. That concern is highest among some of the groups that most moved toward Trump from 2020 to 2024: Hispanic voters (66% concerned), voters under 30 (73%), and men (58%). Among voters making $50,000 to $100,000, 59% expressed concern.
We also asked respondents how they would spend a hypothetical budget surplus of $75 billion. Just 5% of Americans said they would spend it on immigration enforcement, while 31% picked reducing grocery and housing costs, 21% said they’d reduce health care costs, and 13% said they would spend it on Social Security. The administration is all-in on a policy that ranks last on voters’ priority list — tied with education at 5%, behind tax cuts (8%) and infrastructure (9%).
Among voters earning under $50,000, a plurality of 44% chose reducing grocery and housing costs as their top priority. Just 3% chose immigration enforcement.
Six in ten say immigrants deserve their day in court
Trump’s popularity on immigration has not only been declining because of a perception he is too focused on the issue, but also because his administration’s deportation enforcement efforts have been seen as too harsh. NPR/PBS/Marist found in January 2026 that 65% of Americans said ICE has “gone too far” in its enforcement operations — up from 54% last June.
In particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been deporting immigrants so quickly that their attorneys can’t even file petitions in time — and in at least one case, defied a federal court order not to deport a man who claimed U.S. citizenship. Meanwhile, a leaked internal memo revealed that ICE has been forcibly entering homes without judicial warrants since last summer — a policy that has drawn bipartisan concern over Fourth Amendment violations.
And with ICE expanding its detainment operations across the country, in this month’s survey we asked Americans to say whether they thought immigrants arrested by the federal government should have the right to appear before a judge before being deported — a legal right known as habeas corpus — or whether the government should be able to deport them without a court hearing. Overall, 60% of Americans say immigrants should have to appear before a judge before being deported, while 29% said they believed the government should be able to deport without a court hearing.
Support for due process reaches 70% among voters under 30, 72% among Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, 67% among Hispanics, and 61% among independents.
The feeling that immigration enforcement has gone too far, and that people have had their rights violated, has hurt the president’s standing on the issue. The president’s job approval on immigration has plummeted from net -2 in our May 2025 poll to net -15 in February. Border security — his last remaining positive issue rating — cratered from net +4 to net 0 in just the last month. The tipping point in immigration I wrote about in January is now showing up in various metrics.
Voters see immigration partly as an economic issue
For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, pundits have treated immigration and the economy as separate issues in voters’ minds. The collective advice of center-left strategists in Washington has been that you could be tough on the border and deportations while promising growth and lower prices.
This is less true now. This month’s poll shows that criticism of the president’s deportation policy resonates with voters on the grounds that it could increase the cost of everyday goods. In particular, the lower a person’s income in our survey, the more likely they were to be concerned about prices, and to choose lower prices over aggressive deportation enforcement.
To recap: When given the choice explicitly, voters choose lower grocery prices over enforcement by 14 points. Six in ten voters want due process for deportees, by a ratio of two to one. And Trump’s approval on immigration has collapsed to -15 today — he no longer has a single positive issue rating. The state of our union is, in a single term, anti-Trump.
More results from this month’s poll are coming out tomorrow. See the full poll release and methodology for details.
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Footnotes
I did the fieldwork for this survey as a private research consultant, outside my capacity as the author of Strength In Numbers.
& those 2 minutes on affordability? tired retread. Mocking Dems for inventing the word. lying about prices (which anyone who shops, buy gas, pays utility bills know from lived experience are lies). Any initiatives to reduce prices? not that I remember.
So it wasn't really about affordability.
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