Support for abolishing ICE hits a a new high

Americans have turned sharply against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and say it too often resorts to violence

This is my free Chart of the Week — a data-driven look at what’s happening in American politics right now. If you find this useful, consider becoming a paid subscriber to get Tuesday’s premium Deep Dive and support independent polling and political journalism.

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On Wednesday morning, Jan. 7, an agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old mother, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Video footage of the incident went viral and prompted mass protests around the country on Wednesday and Thursday night, from San Diego to Houston to Philadelphia. The Minnesota Timberwolves, a basketball team, held a moment of silence for Good during Thursday3night’s game.

Over the past year, protests against ICE have become regular occurrences. Some notable examples include Newark, after Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested when trying to enter a detention facility; Chicago, where residents physically blocked ICE vehicles from patrolling; Los Angeles, where thousands marched after raids swept through immigrant neighborhoods last June; and Portland, where people in inflatable frog suits became a symbol of anti-ICE resistance.

The solidarity with Renee Good is notable for both its breadth and for what it reminds us about Americans’ changing attitudes toward Donald Trump’s agenda to conduct mass deportations, regardless of the costs. Over the last year, public opinion has shifted meaningfully against Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation policies, and against ICE.

Today’s Chart of the Week: Americans have turned sharply against ICE in Trump’s first year back as president, and say the agency too often resorts to violence. More Americans than ever now say the agency should be abolished.

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I. ICE’s tactics have decreased support for the agency

ICE’s approval rating has collapsed since Trump took office — from +16, according to YouGov/The Economist polling last February, to -14 as of November. In a flash poll conducted on Wednesday, ICE’s job approval came in at 39% approve, 52% disapprove for a score of -13. That’s statistically indistinguishable from the -14 in November. I’ll be watching how this changes.

ICE’s rating began to really decline in late April - early June 2025. That’s around the time the president’s senior advisor for immigration policy, Stephen Miller, ordered his infamous demand for 3,000 immigration arrests per day. Soon after that, the news turned harshly against Trump, with the unpopular deployment of the national guard to Los Angeles and bad optics in Chicago.

By late June 2025, YouGov/Yahoo had ICE at 39% favorable, 52% unfavorable. The new January 2026 numbers (which do not yet reflect movement in opinion as a response to the killing in Minneapolis on Wednesday) are identical. The damage stuck.

The anti-ICE backlash matches a broader decrease in support for Trump’s immigration agenda. In my average of multiple polls, Trump started out with about net +15 support among adults for deporting undocumented immigrants. That number fell almost thirty points, to net -15, between April and mid-July 2025. While Trump has recovered some ground on deportations since then, he has recently sagged again to -9:

But the topline really understates the intensity of public backlash to ICE and its tactics. In February 2025, just 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable view of ICE, per YouGov/The Economist. Today, 40% do. It’s not just that there has been a general move in opinion against the agency. There is a growing and intense, angry opposition to it across America.

So what happened? Americans didn’t suddenly become woke open-borders enthusiasts. My theory is that the growing backlash to ICE is a byproduct of people learning about the agency’s enforcement tactics.

Back in January 2025 (before most of the controversial raids that have taken place in the last year), AP-NORC found that 64% of Americans opposed arrests at schools and 57% opposed arrests at churches. The administration ignored these warnings, targeted migrants at church and school anyway, and it has suffered the consequences in the court of public opinion.

After one Chicago raid, in which American citizens were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night and detained for hours, a Data for Progress poll found Americans nationwide opposed detaining citizens 66 to 26%. The firm also found 70% of Americans oppose zip-tying children during raids, which ICE also did in Chicago. That 70% overall percentage includes 53% of Republicans.

The January 2026 YouGov poll asked whether ICE’s tactics are too forceful, about right, or not forceful enough. A majority of adults said too forceful — 51%. Just 10% wanted more force. That’s a five-to-one ratio. 56% of Independents agreed ICE was using too much force.

Here’s the core finding we keep coming back to: Americans support “strict immigration enforcement” in the abstract, for a vague person who has broken the law, but oppose enforcement in practice, when enforcement means violence and your neighbors disappearing. Voters say yes, enforce the border, but no, don’t traumatize children, don’t deport my neighbor who has lived here for 10 years, and don’t kill people who are protesting you.

The administration bet voters would accept any means of deportations in the service of popular ends. They bet wrong on both fronts.

II. Percent wanting to abolish ICE at a new high

Here’s the statistic that really surprised me this week: The percentage of Americans who support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement is at a new all-time high.

According to Civiqs, 42% of U.S. adults now support abolishing ICE entirely, while 50% oppose getting rid of the agency. That compares to 29% in Summer 2018, when the phrase was a rallying cry for progressives, 21% on Election Day 2024, and 37% in mid 2020, during the recent peak of the social justice movement. As of Jan. 8, independents had moved 15 points toward abolishing the agency in the past year, and even Republicans had increased their support by 6 points.

The 8-point gap between the share of Americans who want to abolish ICE and the share that wants to keep it is the smallest on record. Even in 2020, the gap between the “yes, abolish ICE” and “do, don’t” camps was 17 points. We are at peak abolish ICE, in other words.

I wanted to check that this Civiqs data isn’t an outlier, but polling on abolishing ICE is pretty sparse. Civiqs’ data from 2018 does line up with other polls taken around the time, including a Morning Consult survey that found 54% of the public against the idea. At the time, Civiqs was at 57% opposed.

One more sign of how far things have shifted: protesters are now more popular than ICE. The January 2026 YouGov poll found 44% approve of protests against ICE; 42% disapprove. Compare that to the 39% approve, 52% disapprove for ICE.

Note: It takes about 2 weeks for the public to price in news events

It’s still a bit early after the killing of Renee Good this week to see much movement in the polls. The public will take some time to process the events, and then pollsters will have to field new surveys and process their new data. I expect there will be a modest shock in disapproval of ICE, and maybe a larger increase in the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the agency’s enforcement tactics. We’ll have to wait and see on that.

Over the past year, the more people have seen of ICE, the more they have soured on it. The Trump administration’s tactics have horrified persuadable voters and made even some Republicans uncomfortable. This is what happens when an extreme president enacts an extreme agenda, and when the consequences of that extremity are visual, visceral, and plastered across the news and social media a daily basis.