The ICE shootings are a tipping point
Donald Trump's approval on immigration has dropped 18 points since taking office, and support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement has swung 50 points since Sept. 2024
Note: I wrote this article the morning of Monday, Jan. 26, before news broke that Greg Bovino is being fired as “commander at large” of U.S. border control (the White House disputes the reporting), and that Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski could be next. Bovino’s ouster is further evidence that the politics of immigration enforcement are deteriorating quickly for the Trump administration, and that the backlash I describe below is now driving consequences inside the White House. I’m not saying that this is proof of the tipping point I argue we have hit on immigration, but if we had hit a tipping point, these are the consequences we’d probably see.
Immigration was one of the two big issues that helped Donald Trump win the White House in 2024 — the other being inflation. Last November, we saw how anxiety over prices hurt the president’s party in races for statewide offices around the country. Now, immigration has become a liability for the president, too.
The killing by federal agents of two Americans in Minneapolis this month — Renee Good on Jan. 7, 2026, and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24 — has created a backlash to the administration’s policy of mass deportations and “immigration enforcement” that is causing voters (in all parties) to move against the president’s agenda. As a student of public opinion, I see these events as constituting a classic “tipping point” in how voters see immigration — and how they evaluate their leaders on the issue.
In this week’s Deep Dive, I look at how the data on immigration policy is changing rapidly, how that fits in the context of historical tipping points in U.S. policy and polling, the early effects of the killing of Alex Pretti on members of Congress, and the likely path forward.
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I. The numbers are moving against Trump fast
First, consider the trajectory in Donald Trump’s overall approval rating. His net rating — the difference between the percent of Americans who approve of his presidency and the percent who disapprove — is -17.5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news aggregate, a record low for his second term. But the more telling story is what’s happening on immigration specifically. And his approval percentage also hit a new low this week, at 39.2% of all adults.
Trump started his presidency around +5, so a -18 rating today is a 23 percentage point net shift away from the president in a little over a year.
Focusing on Trump’s issue-by-issue approval, the president has also lost significant ground on immigration. When he took office in Jan. 2025, immigration was the president’s strongest issue. He was actually in positive territory — around +8 net approval — on handling immigration. Voters signaled in the 2024 election that they wanted tougher border enforcement — and at first, they trusted him to deliver it. Trump promised deportations for criminals and no new border crossings, and that’s what voters expected to get.
But now, a year later, that advantage has completely evaporated. My aggregate now shows Trump at -10 on immigration — a collapse of roughly 18 points from his peak. And on deportations specifically (which other aggregators, puzzlingly, do not break out as a separate issue), Trump is at -12.
And, for what it’s worth, the averages may be underestimating Trump’s recent decline on immigration. Other surveys have shown even steeper drops for the president: a New York Times/Siena University poll last week found Trump at -18 on the issue. A NYT poll from last Sept. had Trump at “just” -6, so the Times is clocking a 12-point drop in four months (compared to ~5 points in the average).
The causality here is no mystery. The trend line for Trump’s deportation policy shows a year of steady erosion — similar to the constant march down in his overall rating — and then a sharp acceleration over the past month as the ICE shootings in Minnesota dominated headlines.
The way I have been thinking about this is that by pushing extreme enforcement measures that are now resulting in the deaths of innocent American citizens, Trump has changed the images people attach to the word “immigration” in their heads. When “immigration” doesn’t mean “pictures of migrants under an overpass in south Texas” but “ICE officer killing a woman in her car and calling her a ‘fucking bitch’” or “regular guy being shot 10 times in the back after being tackled to the ground and disarmed”, that’s going to change how people view the issue.
As I wrote last April, opinions change when voters get new information about an issue. The information that has been saturating U.S. political news in the last month is violence against citizens that is a direct result of the president’s policies.
We can see this in the data. YouGov found on Jan. 24 that 48% of Americans believed the shooting of Alex Pretti was not justified, compared to just 20% who said it was. Among respondents who reported they had seen video of Pretti being killed, the margin widened to 63% unjustified vs 25% justified. Even among Republicans, only 44% call the shooting justified:
But perhaps the most striking shift in opinion on immigration during Trump’s second term involves a position considered a career-ender just 16 months ago: abolishing ICE completely. In September 2024, Civiqs found Americans opposed abolishing ICE by 46 points — 20% support, 66% oppose. Democrats who had flirted with the slogan in 2018, when progressives adopted it in speaking out about the Trump administration’s family separation policy, distanced themselves from it.
Now, the circumstances have dramatically changed. By late 2025, Civiqs showed the gap between approve and disapprove down to just 7 points (42% support, 49% oppose). And in a January YouGov poll, the public now supports abolishing ICE by 3 points (46% to 43%), with independents favoring getting rid of the agency by 12 points, 47% to 35%. Even Republicans have moved toward abolition (by about 5%, per Civiqs).
The chart above shows there has been a net 50-point move to the left on abolishing ICE since the fall of 2024. A position that was electoral suicide for Democrats in 2024 is now a toss-up — or better. Marginal voters might even be in favor of it!
This extreme shift, in a position previously considered extreme, is why I think we have reached a tipping point on immigration.
II. This is a tipping point
It is not normal for the public to move 50 points on an issue in just a little over a year.
In their classic 1992 book The Rational Public, political scientists Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro documented that collective public opinion is remarkably stable. Americans’ views on most issues shift only a few percentage points per decade, much of it due to older cohorts being replaced by younger ones. Persuasion is limited, so the aggregate is coherent and slow to adjust. Politicians, pundits, and campaigns all try to move the polls, and mostly fail.
Page and Shapiro argue that opinion change requires new information to meet five conditions simultaneously: it must be received by enough people, understood, relevant to the policy question/issue domain, discrepant with prior beliefs, and credible. Most information fails at least one of these tests, which is why opinion on issues is usually stable. (More on this in an APSR article Page and Shapiro wrote with Glenn Dempsey before The Rational Public was published here.)
But when a major event — or sustained coverage of undeniable evidence — satisfies all five conditions at once, opinion can move quickly. Scholars of public opinion and political communication call this an information-diffusion threshold: the point at which information satisfies the five conditions above and starts moving priors en masse. I’m going to call this a “tipping point:” a point in time when a new piece of information causes many individuals to update their opinions in the same direction at roughly the same time, producing a noticeable break in the polls and notable, directionally aligned changes in policy.
For Page and Shapiro, the classic example of a tipping point is the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in Jan.-Feb. 1968. Before Tet, a majority of Americans supported continuing the War, and official messaging from the U.S. government emphasized progress toward goals. But then came media reports that things were not as they seemed, and the U.S. was “mired in stalemate“ against the North Vietnamese. Critical coverage was widely received, directly relevant to beliefs about whether the war was winnable, sharply discrepant with prior optimistic narratives, and credible through vivid reporting and the general respect for news anchors at this point in American history. By April 1968, the share saying U.S. action in Vietnam was a “mistake” jumped to 48%, up from 37% a year prior, and a plurality of Americans opposed the war. By the autumn of 1968, support had fallen to the mid-30s, and opposition surpassed 50%.
The Abu Ghraib scandal of George W. Bush’s presidency is another canonical case. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in early 2003, early polls showed 70% of Americans approved of the war. But rumors of human rights abuses by U.S. military personnel started leaking out of Iraq in June 2003, and in May 2004 CBS News released the first photographs of torture by U.S. soldiers in a 60 Minutes episode. The story was instantly unavoidable and highly visible. The new information satisfied all five of Page and Shapiro’s conditions for opinion change. Pew documented measurable drops in presidential approval and support for the war throughout 2004.
Now, coming back to the present, the ICE shootings and Trump Administration’s response shootings satisfy all five conditions: The videos of federal officers killing U.S. citizens have been received by the vast majority of adults, they’re easy to understand, directly relevant to whether ICE enforcement has gone too far, they’re sharply discrepant with the narratives Trump’s DHS is pushing out (especially about Alex Pretti, who they initially claimed planned to massacre law enforcement), and they’re credible (there’s lots of video from independent sources covering all angles of both crimes).
In terms of the wide penetration of the events, I’ll note that social media accounts with no political affiliation — bourbon enthusiasts, hobby communities, sports brands, etc — are now posting anti-ICE content. People I know who are never political are enraged by the events. Over the weekend, photos of Alex Pretti were the lead posts on Reddit communities on hiking and biking that I follow. Another modern way of saying this is that anti-ICE sentiment has “gone mainstream.”
Thus, you get a 50-point swing on abolishing ICE in 16 months, and a sudden crash in Trump’s approval on the issue.
III. Early political disruptions, from the other side of the tipping point
Backlash to Trump isn’t just coming from the left. This weekend, classical liberal and The Atlantic contributor Jonathan Rauch published a piece explicitly calling Trump a fascist. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (recently anti-Trump on occasion, but certainly not progressive) called for ICE to “pause” in Minneapolis. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham even appears to be backpedaling on DHS existing as its own agency!
And there is a growing sentiment among even Trump voters that they didn’t vote for this (something I pointed out in the polling last June). There are notable breaks from within Trump’s own media ecosystem — including from Tim Pool, a MAGA-friendly podcaster with millions of followers who publicly broke with Trump this weekend, and Joe Rogan, whose endorsement of Trump may have won him the 2024 election but recently compared the agency to the Gestapo.
Here’s a summary from political scientist Seth Masket of where some other notable figures and institutions stand:
Plus, there is growing dissent from some elected Republicans and DHS rank-and-file about what officials are doing. House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino and his Senate counterpart Rand Paul have both requested testimony from ICE and CBP. Plus, key Republican senators, including Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, have called for investigations into ICE in general and the killing of Alex Pretti in particular. Cassidy, facing a Trump-backed primary challenger, called the shooting “incredibly disturbing” and said “the credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake.” Collins questioned whether “excessive force was used in a situation that may have been able to be defused without violence.”
There are signs of discontent within the agencies themselves. Bill Melugin of Fox News — arguably the best-sourced journalist inside ICE and CBP — reported that over a dozen sources inside ICE and the DHS are upset with the public messaging from DHS leadership:
Some of these sources have described DHS’ response to the shooting as “a case study on how not to do crisis PR”, one said they are so “fed up” that they wish they could retire, another said “DHS is making the situation worse”, and another added that “DHS is wrong” and “we are losing this war, we are losing the base and the narrative.”
And there are also cracks in the GOP over the administration’s response to claims that Pretti was dangerous just because he was carrying a gun. Rep. Thomas Massie said “Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence. It’s a Constitutionally protected God-given right, and if you don’t understand this you have no business in law enforcement or government.” The NRA urged “responsible public voices” to await a full investigation rather than “demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
There has also been some notable movement among moderate Democrats. Amy Klobuchar announced she would vote against DHS funding unless there’s accountability for the Minneapolis shooting. And even Chuck Schumer has united the caucus behind blocking the department’s appropriations.
And on the electoral front, Republican Chris Madel on Monday withdrew from the Minnesota governor’s race, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so…. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”
IV. The end of Trump’s edge on immigration?
Immigration was supposed to be Trump’s ace. Throughout 2024, he relentlessly attacked Democrats on the border, sanctuary cities, and migrant crime. The message resonated. Voters trusted him on the issue more than they trusted Biden or Harris. He won on it. The predominant belief among pundits was that Democrats just couldn’t touch Trump on immigration.
But Trump’s advantage on the issue has now vanished. The prior pessimism from pundits on Democrats’ ability to fight Trump on deportations reflects both a failure to imagine how public opinion could move in the near future and a genuine change in how voters are perceiving immigrants and immigration. “Immigration enforcement” is now synonymous with federal agents killing people in the street. The dozens of first-hand videos of ICE and CBP officers killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good are now permanently attached to the word “immigration” for millions of Americans. That association will be hard to dislodge.
Now comes the question of what happens next.
For Republicans in competitive seats for 2026, the pressure is on. I will have more on this soon, but data shows Trump is underwater on immigration in nearly every swing seat. Republican senators and House representatives will have to reckon with one of their lead issues in 2024 becoming a potentially huge liability for ‘26.
On the accountability front, it now looks likely that investigations — by Republicans — will happen in Congress. And on Monday, Jan. 26, Trump announced the current head of ICE was being recalled from Minnesota back to Washington, D.C. Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday refused to defend comments Stephen Miller made about Alex Pretti (Miller called him a “terrorist).
In policy terms, the question is: What lies on the other side of a tipping point? The answer is change that once seemed impossible. Press coverage of the Tet Offensive catalyzed the end of American involvement in Vietnam. Abu Ghraib permanently shifted elite opinion against the Iraq War and influenced mass opinion against military detention practices and torture.
Tipping points, once crossed, don’t usually reverse; that is why they are called tipping points. ICE and DHS are remarkably young institutions. Sixteen months ago, the idea that they might face genuine accountability, structural reform, or even abolition seemed politically absurd. Today, it doesn’t.
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This is such good analysis. Thank you!
Saturday afternoon, as Democrats and broadly speaking, the left, were winning the war over the disinformation coming from Trump, Noem, DHS, etc. it clicked for me. It was a tipping point because the right's share of voice on social media is so much larger than the left's, yet we were winning the battle on social media.
Now comes another hard part. Our elected leaders need to keep pressing the advantage every single day. We all need to push our elected officials every single day to not back down. We have the public on our side.
The Anime and gaming communities are posting anti-ICE content. My son showed me one while I was reading this article. That is a community that rarely ventures into the outside world. If it's breaking thru there, more evidence of a tipping point