PASSAIC, N.J. (AP) — Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign of immigration enforcement to make America safer- as he puts it. But federal judges have thwarted his efforts. But unlike in his first term, Trump’s efforts haven’t sparked the kind of widespread condemnation or protests that led him to retreat from some unpopular positions.
Instead, immigration has emerged as one of Trump’s strongest issues in public polling, reflecting his popularity with the Republican base and a broader shift in public sentiment driven in part, interviews suggest, by anger at the policies of his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
The White House has seized on this shift, mocking critics and egging on Democrats to engage on an issue Trump’s team sees as a win.
“America’s changed,” said pollster Frank Luntz, a longtime ally of Republicans who’s been holding focus groups with voters to discuss immigration. “This is the one area where Donald Trump still has significant and widespread public support.”
In the 2020 election, few voters considered immigration the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast.
Voters in the 2024 election were also more open to tougher immigration policies than the 2020 electorate. Last November, 44% of voters said most immigrants living in the United States illegally should be deported to their home countries, according to AP VoteCast, compared with 29% in 2020.
The changing views are evident in places like northern New Jersey’s suburban Passaic County, one of the former Democratic strongholds where Trump overperformed in November.
Trump became the first Republican to win the county in more than 30 years. He carried the heavily Latino city of Passaic and significantly increased his support in Paterson, the state’s third-largest city, which is majority Latino and also has a large Muslim community. He drew 13,819 votes after winning 3,999 in 2016. Having lost New Jersey by nearly 16 percentage points to Biden in 2020, Trump narrowed that margin to 6 percentage points last year.
Paterson resident Sunny Cumur, 54, a truck driver who immigrated from Turkey in the late 1990s, describes himself as a Democrat who doesn’t usually vote. But he wanted Trump to win, he said, because he was concerned about the border under Biden.
“What Biden did, they opened all the borders and a lot of people come here for political asylum. Come on! They don’t even check if they are terrorists or not,” Cumur said.
“Throw ’em out. I don’t want to live with criminals,” he said.
Still, other supporters worry Trump is taking things too far.
Republican Manuel Terrero, 39, a real estate agent from Clifton, said he was drawn to Trump because of what felt like “chaos” under Biden, with too many people crossing the border and too much crime in neighboring New York.
“It shouldn’t be allowed,” said Terrero, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
Trump “is doing a lot of good things. And that is one of them, stopping the people that are coming here to create chaos. And the people that have criminal records, send them back. But I am against (deporting) the people that are working,” he said.
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