Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal.
A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.
The new poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a pollster that Trump has used in all of his presidential elections, and shared exclusively with POLITICO. It found that 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrants who enter the country illegally. When asked if they support deporting all deportable migrants, not just violent criminals, a majority (58 percent) say they do.
Eighty-seven percent of Trump 2024 voters surveyed, including 79 percent of Hispanic Trump voters, want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“Overwhelmingly, Trump voters expect this from the administration. They don’t just support it, they expect it,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, which advocates for conservative immigration policy. “This is a good way to re-energize the base as we move into the midterms, the same way that Trump was able to do so in the lead up to the 2024 general election.”
The new coalition includes Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump; Erik Prince, a Trump ally and former Blackwater CEO; as well as a number of conservative think-tanks and lobbying groups close to the Trump administration including the Heritage Foundation, Federation for American Immigration Reform American Moment, and the Claremont Institute.
Morgan, who also served as chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under both former President Barack Obama and Trump, said a deportation strategy that involves targeting only violent criminals, gang members or terrorists for deportation is “a Clinton-Obama-Biden policy. And it’s historically been a disastrous failure.”
The campaign comes as other Republican strategists and lawmakers warn Trump’s mass deportation agenda is becoming increasingly unpopular following ICE operations in Minnesota that killed two U.S. citizens, and could hurt the party’s chances of retaining control of Congress.
Since then, the administration has pivoted its message on immigration enforcement while overhauling its leadership at DHS. Border czar Tom Homan replaced CBP chief Greg Bovino in Minneapolis and drew down the immigration enforcement presence there; the president ousted DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last week and tapped Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to replace her; and even Trump, in his State of the Union address, focused mostly on border security and deporting violent criminals.
On Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair instructed House Republicans to curb their hardline rhetoric and instead focus on removing violent criminals. Blair doubled down in a post on X, writing thatRepublicans are focused on “deporting the violent/criminal illegals that Joe Biden & the Democrats in Congress let in.”
Those comments angered members of the coalition, who say taking a “worst of the worst” approach to deportations is not a winning policy.
Still, the coalition’s poll results differ drastically from other recent polling on immigration: A January POLITICO poll found that nearly half of U.S. adults say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 of his 2024 voters. AFebruary NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that 65 percent of U.S. adults think Immigration and Customs Enforcements has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied that the White House has shifted its deportation approach.
“Nobody is changing the Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” Jackson said. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities. As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, approximately 70 percent of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records. Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately 3 million illegals have left the United States, either through forced deportation or self-deportation, with zero illegals coming through the most secure border in U.S. History for nine straight months.”
According to an internal DHS document obtained by CBS News, less than 14 percent of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year in office had violent criminal records.
Hispanic GOP lawmakers have recently lobbied DHS and the White House, expressing concern that the aggressive deportation approach could alienate the Hispanic voters that helped secure Trump’s victory in 2024. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) acknowledged those concerns Tuesday, telling reporters that there has been a “hiccup” with some Hispanic and other voters who view DHS’ approach as “overzealous.”
“Everybody can describe it differently, but here’s the good news,” Johnson added. “We’re in a course-correction mode right now.”
But the Mass Deportation Coalition is hoping its poll — which was commissioned by Chmielenski’s Immigration Accountability Project and conducted between Feb. 27 and March 3 — will course-correct that course correction. The online survey had a sample of 2,000 likely voters and a margin of error of 2.2 percent.
Chmielenski said he views the first year of Trump’s term as “phase one” of this deportation push, and now wants to see the administration enter “phase two”: by focusing on worksite raids, targeting any deportable individual and reaching 1 million removals in 2026. The Department of Homeland Security said it deported more than 600,000 individuals in 2025.
“Now that we’re a year into the administration, the public sentiment hasn’t changed,” Chmielenski said. “We still believe the Trump administration … has a mandate on mass deportations.”
