Trump is losing normies on immigration

Americans might want more border enforcement, but they don't want ICE agents killing civilians.

Protestors in Minneapolis on Jan. 23. Brandon Bell/Getty Images.

Yesterday, a U.S. border patrol agent shot and killed a 37-year-old Minnesota man, Alex Pretti, for the crime of … actually, it’s not clear why he was killed. Pretti was an ICU nurse who was filming a confrontation between an immigration agent and two civilians. He had a gun on him, but he was licensed to carry it. It doesn’t appear that he was holding his weapon at any point, and it was removed from his person moments before he was shot — shot at least 10 times despite already having been pinned down on the ground.

And, of course, this is the second such incident captured on video in Minneapolis within 17 days. Another citizen, Renee Good, was shot and killed in her vehicle by an ICE agent on Jan. 7.

I wrote about public opinion on ICE on immigration in a New York Times chat following that incident, noting that initial polling showed that few voters thought Good’s killing was justified and that public opinion was turning against ICE. Indeed, in our tracking, Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has declined by about 4 points since the day before Good’s death until today. Meanwhile, his overall approval rating has declined by 2 points and is near its second-term lows.

Note also that there’s no longer much of a gap between Trump’s immigration numbers and his overall approval rating. On average, over the course of his term, Trump’s net approval on immigration has been about 6 points better than his overall rating; it had been his least-bad issue. Now, that gap has mostly evaporated.

Of course, there’s been a lot of other news during this period. The U.S. performed a raid on Venezuela, capturing President Nicolas Maduro. Trump repeatedly threatened to take Greenland by one means or another, further fraying relations with our NATO allies, before backing off last week. And the U.S. Attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump has repeatedly criticized, on dubious premises

However, ICE had lingered in the news in the way these other stories hadn’t, at least according to Google Trends data. It’s the blue line in the chart below. Venezuela (yellow) produced a bigger initial spike in search interest, but attention to the story dissipated quickly. Searches for ICE have remained much higher than before their pre-Good levels, however. (And now, after Pretti’s killing, they’re back to roughly the previous peak.)

It’s sometimes hard to predict which stories will stick in the news and which ones won’t. Good’s case is clearly one that broke through; however. In the Quinnipiac poll, 82 percent of respondents said they’d seen video of the incident.¹

Why? Well, as I said in the NYT chat, “There’s sort of a white-and-gold versus blue-and-black dress element, where people are looking at the same video and coming to completely different conclusions. There’s obviously also a lot of precedent for concern about police officers, or in this case, ICE officers, killing civilians. This incident took place less than a mile away from where George Floyd was killed.”

Another contributing factor may have been the White House’s response. Kristi Noem called a Good a “domestic terrorist” and Trump said that she “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”

There’s an idea in politics called the Overton window: that you sometimes you want to make an extreme, even untenable point to broaden the boundaries of “acceptable” discourse and make regular partisan spin seem tame by comparison. I never really seen much evidence that this actually works, however. Sometimes you just torch your credibility, especially when voters can cross-reference your claims with evidence they can see for themselves.

Trump, belatedly, seems to have realized this. On Tuesday, almost two weeks after the incident, President Trump called Good’s shooting “a horrible thing.” “You know they’re going to make mistakes,” Trump said. “Sometimes ICE is going to be too rough with somebody.”

However, after Pretti’s killing, the White House reverted to its old strategy, with chief policy advisor Stephen Miller doubling down by referring to an “assassin [who] tried to murder federal agents”.

Frankly, at least to my eyes, there’s even less to debate with Pretti than with Good.² You have to be a complete sycophant to see anything in the video that would support Miller’s description of him as an “assassin”. Most people are going to trust the ICU nurse before the ICE agent.

If you’re coming across this post and you’re not a regular reader of Silver Bulletin, I want to be clear that I obviously don’t always take the position that liberals are on the right side of public opinion about everything. For example, I thought that immigration was a major cause of Trump’s win last year. I had mixed feelings about how politically smart it was for Democrats to press the case about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation. I think Democratic influencers often cherry-pick polls to tell them the public is with them when it isn’t. And I’m also often critical of how the mainstream media covers stories like this one.

But on this story, I don’t think Miller’s gaslighting is going to work. Unlike with Abrego Garcia (but like with Good), there’s video here. And while many Americans want more border enforcement, Minneapolis is about 1500 miles away from the nearest southern border crossing. Many Americans aren’t sympathetic to armed, poorly-trained ICE officers roaming city streets to begin with.

While 41 percent of voters approve of Trump overall, only 24 percent strongly approve of his performance, and those numbers have been declining. Trump lost Joe Rogan on the Renee Good case and even some conservative influencers like Tim Pool aren’t buying the White House’s spin on Pretti. Not that Rogan and Pool are “normies”, but this is the sort of thing you start to see when public opinion breaks 70/30 or 75/25 or 80/20 against you on an issue.

Nor is the story isn’t going away any time soon, especially with the Senate set to vote on a DHS funding bill that even moderate Democrats are now objecting to. In fact, another government shutdown is very possible.

I’m not (yet) going to try to game out any particular strategy. And sure, yes, of course, it’s possible that Democrats will misplay or overplay their hand. These are Democrats, after all. But any shutdown at least has the potential to be a lot more focused and targeted than the previous one was. While Trump might have started out with the benefit of the doubt from the public on immigration, the White House has done just about everything possible following these two killings of civilians in Minneapolis to squander it.

1. That’s probably a little inflated; polls can have a slight response bias toward people who watch the news, and sometimes people claim to have more knowledge of news developments than they actually do. But if the “real” number is 70 percent or something instead, I’m not sure that makes a big difference.

2. Her incident unfolded more quickly, Good did ignore an order to exit her car, and it’s taken some fairly painstaking video analysis to reveal what sort of contact her vehicle did or didn’t make with the ICE officer.