Poll shows Americans uneasy about ICE raids and citizen arrests

Nearly a year after President Donald Trump pledged on the 2024 campaign trail to carry out what he called the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a new YouGov poll finds many Americans uneasy with the scale and methods of the administration's immigration enforcement push. The survey, conducted Oct. 6 with 2,295 U.S. adults, found broad concern about whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are improperly detaining U.S. citizens and about the forcefulness of recent raids, even as federal officials report large numbers of removals since January.

The Department of Homeland Security announced in September that roughly 400,000 noncitizens have been deported since January and that about 1.6 million additional people have self-deported. The YouGov poll, with a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points, found 60 percent of respondents said ICE agents wrongly arrest American citizens often or sometimes; 35 percent said often and 25 percent said sometimes. Respondents were split along partisan lines: most Democrats and independents reported frequent or occasional wrongful arrests, while a majority of Republicans said such arrests occur rarely or not at all.