Comment by Defenestresque

I apologize for resurrecting a fairly old thread (I originally came across it via Googling the Claude Ad announcement), and this has nothing to do with the main post anyway but my desire not to further derail things is butting up against my pigheadedness as famously exemplified in xkcd.com/386

You wrote "the majority of US citizens support ICE", later specifying it was after the controversial killings. I want to fact-check your claim, because if I came here from Google I think others may too and so far there has been no pushback on this apart from "no, they don't support ICE" which is problematic.

The Navigator Research poll is probably the most interesting in terms of actually visualizing the data [5], it used to be at the bottom but I moved this section to the top. It's an excellent visualization, my eye was especially drawn to the incredibly stark divide between the MAGA-Republicans vs. non-MAGA Republicans. I've never seen it in such contrast and I wonder how that will play out. Regardless, that's outside of the topic of this comment, wich is already too long.

The poll (n=~1,000) conducted around the five following days states that among all those polled, the Net Favorable rating, asked as:

    Please indicate how favorable or unfavorable you are to: ICE, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

was:

    June 30 '25    - 8
    Dec   8 '25    -14
    Jan  12 '26    -20
    Feb   1 '26    -22

As an added curio, among Democrats it shifted -12 points, but among Republicans it shifted -17 points. Make of that what you will.

A poll released on February 5th and conducted January 27th-30th (n=1,462) by Marist University's MaristPoll organization states [1]:

    62% of Americans say the actions of ICE are making Americans somewhat less safe or much less safe. 37% think the actions of ICE are making Americans much more safe or somewhat more safe

The following information is from Pages 14-16 of the PDF [2]. The specific question was:

    Do you approve or disapprove of the job Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing?

    33% Approve
    60% Disapprove
     7% Unsure

The poll is extremely along the party lines in some respects (e.g. only 2% of the people who answered 'Approve' voted for Kamala in 2024), but I feel like that's to be expected. At the same time, while people who approve of ICE definitely didn't vote for Kamala, people who voted for Trump are not extremely strong supporters, with 24% of 2024 Trump voters answering either Disapprove or Unsure (18% and 6% respectively).

Some other interesting correlations are that while recent ICE actions are generally very unpopular among Democrats and somewhat popular among Republicans, the usual rural/urban differences which are usually much better predictors for how someone will vote, far ahead of correlations with education, race or income. In this case "approve" difference between Big city (31%) and Rural (43%) was only 12 points. Interestingly, the approval rating almost follows a reverse bell curve (?) in terms of population density:

    Big city   31%
    Small city 31%
    Suburban   28%
    Small town 40%
    Rural      43%

Again, apologies for the digression, I figured maybe someone can make some sense of those numbers. Another question:

    How would you describe the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in enforcing immigration laws? Do you think they have:

    65% Gone too far 
    12% Not gone far enough
    22% Or are their actions about right
     1% Vol: unsure

This can be summarized in a bunch of different ways, but it's not dishonest to say that 2/3rds of Americans think that ICE has "gone too far", which heavily contradicts your statement. Everything after this is kind of just because I felt three is the minimum number of sources to thoroughly dismiss your assertion.

Here are the results from June, 2025 for the exact same question, with the change in percentage from June, 2025 to January, 2026 in brackets.

    54% Gone too far                      [+11%]
    18% Not gone far enough               [-06%]
    26% Or are their actions about right  [-04%]
     1% Vol: Unsure

Ipsos released a poll [3] on January 27th, conducted between January 23rd-25th (n=1,139) with a self-reported margin of error of +/- 3.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Immigration-related outtakes:

Only 10% of those polled picked "Immigration" as their selection to a 17-option question that asked "In your opinion, what is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?" By comparison, 15% picked the "Economy, unemployment and jobs", 12% picked "Political violence and extremism" and 16% picked "Threats to democratic values and norms" (Page 1)

    Overall, do you think efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deal with unauthorized immigration in the country... (Page 10)

    Go too far           58% 
    Do not go far enough 12%
    Are about right      26%
    
    Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling the following issues? Immigration (Page 3)

    Strongly approve    26%
    Somewhat approve    14%
    Somewhat disapprove 10%
    Strongly disapprove 43%

    Generally speaking, would you say the following things are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track? Immigration policy (Page 5)

    Right direction 35%
    Wrong track     51%
    Don’t know      11%

P.S. I don't claim this comment to be unbiased, I clearly "cherry-picked" certain facts, but they were not out of context nor did I massage the numbers, the reason I phrased it this way was because it was a direct rebuttal to the claim that most Americans support ICE [even after the shootings].

[1] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-febru... [2] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR... [3] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-say-federal-i... [4] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... [5] https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Nav...