Brad Todd is a Republican campaign strategist and a political commentator for CNN.
In 2016, I coined a phrase that became a template for understanding the Trump political phenomenon: The media, to its detriment, takes him literally but not seriously, while his voters do the reverse. Now, President Donald Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security has made the same mistake with his most important voters — swing voters.
Trump’s 2024 comeback was largely due to American frustration with President Joe Biden opening the southern border to all comers. A June 2024 poll by CBS showed 62 percent of Americans, including more than one-third of Democrats, favored deporting all undocumented immigrants in the country.
Secretary Kristi L. Noem’s DHS took that sentiment literally and started a mass deportation campaign. It should have taken the voters seriously, instead of literally.
By the time that CBS poll was taken, voters were rightly fed up with Biden’s warping of immigration laws, which had attracted millions of migrants, overwhelmed community resources and strained the public’s patience. No wonder they told pollsters they wanted the pendulum to swing back, but DHS overread the mandate.
A broad coalition of Americans supports removing the “worst of the worst” — illegal immigrants who have violent or serious criminal records. At the time of Trump’s second inauguration, even a majority of Democrats agreed. A much smaller group wants wholesale deportation, beyond just violent offenders and those who become felons by entering illegally twice.
A meaningful slice of hardcore Republican voters wants mass deportation of noncitizens and backs DHS’s no-apologies approach. But overall, the issue that was most responsible for electing the president is becoming a weakness in the middle, according to polls, with trust in the administration’s handling of immigration falling dramatically since August.
Swing voters chose Trump to make the waves of border crossings stop — and he did. Biden’s lax enforcement attracted nearly 241,000 people to the southern border in October 2024. Within two months of being sworn in, Trump had cut the number to around 11,000 per month and has kept it there. It is his crowning achievement and should be the centerpiece of the Republican midterm campaign.
But falling poll numbers show interior enforcement is undermining Trump’s strength, and no political movement can thrive with its strongest pillar wobbling. How did it happen? The disconnect is the breadth and intensity of tactics on the ground, but it can be fixed.
Polling during the Border Patrol’s Los Angeles surge last summer was telling. Voters who believed DHS was targeting the “worst of the worst” were more likely to support the administration. That survey also showed that while 55 percent of respondents liked Trump’s deportation goals, only 44 percent liked his approach. DHS should have seen the warning, but it may have misread Trump’s mandate.
The president has dispatched the capable Tom Homan to reset thingsin Minnesota after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by federal agents, but the needed correction is bigger. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), a strong Trump supporter, told CNN on Sunday the wide-net roundups should stop: “What is the endgame? I don’t think it’s to deport every single non-U.S. citizen.”
The libertarian Cato Institute’s analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data indicates 73 percent of those deported from October to November 2025 had no criminal record, and only 8 percent had violent or property crime charges. If correct, those numbers illuminate the political problem.
The administration can take three actions to reorient enforcement to where swing voters are:
First, respect the asylum process, even though Biden warped it, and adjudicate asylum cases quickly and faithfully. Instead of hiring thousands of ICE agents, DHS should hire immigration judges to clear the backlog of asylum applications, most of which will fail, some of which should not.
Second, de-prioritize deportation of nonviolent noncitizens who are productive in their communities and cooperate with ICE to pursue legal status or residence in a safe third country. Making clear — through numbers, not just words — that the mission is deporting the dangerous, as opposed to nannies and roofers, will help in the electoral middle.
Finally, use the full discretionary power of federal agencies to crack down on localities hostile to immigration enforcement.
In red states, where local officials cooperate with immigration enforcement, there has not been chaos in the streets. Democrats such as Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who encouraged liberals to “put your body on the line,” have created a riot mentality that is endangering law enforcement officials and obscuring lessons DHS needs to learn.
Blue jurisdictions have no justification to protect criminals and gum up legitimate enforcement of federal law. Federal agencies have tools to fight back: Medicaid program waivers, transportation grants and housing projects can be leveraged. Governors who do not help the administration on its priority can lose the federal government’s help on their priorities.
Trump has always had a keen sense of his coalition, not just his base. Failing to rebuild centrist trust on immigration could let Democrats take Congress and start impeachments again. Trump knows that. Let’s see how he makes DHS adjust.
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