On Tuesday, the day after hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants effectively lost their temporary protected status that allowed them to live and work in the US, Republican pundit Steve Bannon wasted little time in demanding their instant removal.
“I was under the assumption that when they pulled TPS and their eligibility for that program ended … they were going to be boarding planes or buses today … today, this morning at dawn to go back to Haiti,” said Bannon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, on his War Room podcast on Tuesday. “Why are they not out of the country?”
Mike Davis, a conservative political strategist agreed with Bannon: “The solution is to get these people the hell out of our country as fast as possible, and that includes these Haitians.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has been a vocal critic of Trump’s deportation policies because he doesn’t find them extreme enough, called Haitians “the worst of the worst” and “very low IQ people” on his Rumble show Tuesday night.
In a Telegram channel run by the Proud Boys of Columbus, one member posted a clip of the song “I’m Walking on Sunshine” alongside the news about the revoking of temporary protected status. “They gotta go back,” the member wrote.
It’s been a while since shock-and-awe tactics from Immigration and Customs Enforcement first gained national notoriety. For months, figures like former Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino terrorized cities like Minneapolis and Chicago. But since replacing former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin—derisively referred to by Bannon as the “Kung fu plumber”—ICE’s operations have shrunk into the shadows, though the agency’s deportation and arrest numbers have remained astronomical.
In recent weeks, things are boiling over again.
Earlier this month, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas. Araujo had lived in the country for 35 years, had three children, and owned his own business. Just days later, another ICE agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Both men were shot while in their vehicles. ICE, as WIRED has revealed, is also tracking its critics online, using data brokers to “identify unaccompanied minors,” and working to prevent state health inspectors from reviewing its network of detention centers. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was now targeting immigrants at airports whose visas have expired, or are in a transition status, arresting spouses of American citizens.
Even so, Steve Bannon and the other Republican pundits aren’t alone: Support for ICE among Trump’s most loyal supporters remains incredibly high, with 74 percent of people who identify as MAGA Republicans professing confidence in ICE, according to a YouGov poll published last week. The same poll shows that 80 percent of MAGA Republicans oppose abolishing ICE.
The YouGov findings were backed up by another poll published last week by the Public Religion Research Institute , which found that three-quarters of Republicans had a positive view of ICE, would be in favor of more funding for the agency, and disagreed that ICE was making communities less safe. The poll also found that 73 percent of Republicans are in support of internment camps to hold “immigrants who are in the country illegally” until they can be deported.
The YouGov poll also found that just 51 percent of Republicans had, in the week of the shootings, read, seen, or heard anything about immigrants being shot and killed by ICE agents. What they may have seen however is Trump’s Truth Social post around the same time. In the post, Trump appeared to overrule an internal ICE memo telling agents to suspend vehicle stops, after a furious response from his MAGA base. He also told his supporters that ICE was “loved and respected in America.”
Much of his base thinks that deportations are actually not happening fast enough. ICE is on track to deport 458,000 individuals this year according to its own data, a colossal figure that still falls well short of the 1 million deportations Trump promised shortly after his inauguration. (This, in the words of border czar Tom Homan, is what the administration calls “deportation-maxxing.”)
Americans have been caught in the dragnet as well, as ICE’s actions have resulted in widespread civil rights violations, according to a report published this month by the American Civil Liberties Union, which found that across eight states, ICE agents targeted 155 US citizens, 32 of whom were children, during the first year of Trump’s second term. Previous research from UC Berkeley found that half of all the people ICE has arrested had no criminal records, despite the administration claiming to be deporting the “worst of the worst.” Federal agents have shot and killed four people, including two US citizens.
On the other hand, the majority of Americans believe ICE has used too much force, according to YouGov, and as a result have little or no confidence in the agency. Almost half of Americans believe it's time for ICE to be abolished.
What these polls show is that while America as a whole is rejecting Trump’s immigration policies, his base is almost completely supportive. And rather than distancing themselves from ICE’s actions, Republicans seem to be leaning in again, even spending more money and running more ads about immigration than Democrats, NPR reported last week.
With just months left before the midterms offer voters a chance to have their say on these policies, Republicans are gambling that their base doesn’t actually want ICE going anywhere. In November, the country will see if they’re right.
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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