PASSAIC, N.J. – Alleged gang members without criminal records wrongly sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

International students detained by masked federal agents for writing opinion columns or attending campus demonstrations.

American citizens, visa holders and visitors stopped at airports, detained for days or facing deportation for minor infractions.

Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him. But unlike in his first term, Trump’s efforts have not sparked the kind of widespread condemnation or protests that led him to retreat from some unpopular positions.

Instead, immigration has emerged as one of Trump’s strongest issues in public polling, reflecting both his grip on the Republican base and a broader shift in public sentiment that is driven in part, interviews suggest, by anger at the policies of his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.

The White House has seized on this shift, mocking critics and egging on Democrats to engage on an issue that Trump’s team sees as a win.

“America’s changed,” said pollster Frank Luntz, a longtime ally of Republicans who has been holding focus groups with voters to discuss immigration. “This is the one area where Donald Trump still has significant and widespread public support.”

Luntz said voters dismayed by the historically large influx of migrants under Biden are now “prepared to accept a more extreme approach.”

“Make no mistake,” he added. “The public may not embrace it, but they definitely support it. And this is actually his strongest area as he approaches his 100th day (in office).”

Changing views

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that immigration is a relative high point for Trump compared with other issues, including his approach to the economy, foreign policy and trade negotiations. Slightly fewer than half of U.S. adults, 46%, say they approve of Trump’s handling of the issue, compared with his overall job approval rating of 39%, according to the survey.

The poll was conducted April 17-21, a period that included a trip by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., to El Salvador to demand that Kilmar Abrego Garcia be released from prison after the U.S. government admitted he was wrongly deported.

In the 2020 election, few voters considered immigration the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of registered voters in all 50 states.

Four years later, after Republicans and conservative media had hammered Biden for his policies and often cast migrant U.S.-Mexico border crossings as an invasion, immigration had risen above health care, abortion and crime. It was second only to the economy.

Under Biden, migrant apprehensions spiked to more than 2 million two years in a row. Republican governors in border states bused migrants by the tens of thousands to cities across the country, including to New York, where migrants were placed in shelters and hotels, straining budgets.

Voters in the 2024 election were also more open to tougher immigration policies than the 2020 electorate. Last November, 44% of voters said most immigrants living in the United States illegally should be deported to their home countries, according to AP VoteCast, compared with 29% in 2020.

Immigration remains a relative strength for Trump today: 84% of Republicans approve of Trump’s immigration approach, according to the April AP-NORC poll, compared with 68% who approve of how he is handling trade negotiations.

The poll found about 4 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favor Trump’s policy of sending Venezuelan immigrants who authorities say are gang members to El Salvador, with an additional 22% saying they neither favor nor oppose it. About 4 in 10 were opposed.

Americans are more opposed, broadly, to revoking foreign students’ visas over their participation in pro-Palestinian activism, with about half opposed and about 3 in 10 in support.

The changing views are evident in places like northern New Jersey’s suburban Passaic County, one of the former Democratic strongholds where Trump overperformed in November.

Trump became the first Republican to win the county in more than 30 years. He carried the heavily Latino city of Passaic and significantly increased his support in Paterson, the state’s third-largest city, which is majority Latino and also has a large Muslim community. He drew 13,819 votes after winning 3,999 in 2016. Having lost New Jersey by nearly 16 percentage points to Biden in 2020, Trump narrowed that margin to 6 percentage points last year.

Paterson resident Sunny Cumur, 54, a truck driver who immigrated from Turkey in the late 1990s, describes himself as a Democrat who doesn’t usually vote. But he wanted Trump to win, he said, because he was concerned about the border under Biden.

While studies show immigrants are generally less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, local news in New York and other cities frequently featured what Trump took to calling “migrant crime.”

“What Biden did, they opened all the borders, and a lot of people come here for political asylum. Come on! They don’t even check if they are terrorists or not,” Cumur said. He complained that newcomers willing to work for lower wages have been undercutting workers like him.

“Throw ’em out. I don’t want to live with criminals,” he said.

Still, other supporters worry Trump is taking things too far.

Republican Manuel Terrero, 39, a real estate agent from Clifton, said he was drawn to Trump because of what felt like “chaos” under Biden, with too many people crossing the border and too much crime in neighboring New York.

“It shouldn’t be allowed,” said Terrero, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.

Trump “is doing a lot of good things. And that is one of them, stopping the people that are coming here to create chaos. And the people that have criminal records, send them back. But I am against (deporting) the people that are working,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the right way to do it.”

Rep. Nellie Pou, D-N.J., who was elected last year to represent the area in Congress, said her constituents believe strongly in border security but stand by her advocacy for immigrants. She recently joined Democrats on a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I do not want anyone that may be a danger to come to our country to harm any of our citizens. No one wants that. And I firmly believe that’s what people in our district and across America want,” she said. At the same time, she said, “Our country was made of immigrants. … So I believe there’s a place for someone who comes in the legal ways.”

A new paradigm

Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015 by labeling Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and pledging to build “a great wall.” He spent much of his first term focused on the border.

One of his first actions in office was to impose a travel ban barring the entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. That caused chaos at airports and protests across the nation. The policy was quickly blocked by the courts, forcing his administration to offer three broader iterations, the last of which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.

The next flashpoint came in 2018, when border officials began separating families detained after illegally crossing the border. In some cases, children were forcibly removed from their parents under a “zero tolerance” policy, and the parents were sometimes deported without their kids.

Images of children held in cages at border facilities and audio recordings of young children crying for their parents drew intense backlash, with thousands participating in hundreds of marches across the country. The protesters included soon-to-be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who was photographed in 2018 breaking down outside a facility in Texas being used to detain migrant children.

Republicans joined in that condemnation.

Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, called the separations “tragic and heartrending” in a letter that urged Congress to act. “This disgraceful condition must end,” he wrote.

“All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers. This must stop,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. He introduced legislation mandating that apprehended families be kept together.

Bowing to pressure and concerned about the impact on the upcoming midterm elections, Trump halted the policy.

This time around, with border crossings down, Trump has shifted focus to expelling people already in the United States. He is expanding the limits of executive power and jousting with judges as he uses old laws and rarely used provisions to label hundreds of men gang members so they can be deported without being able to challenge their cases in court.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who as a senator once tried to negotiate a bipartisan immigration package — has moved to expel people in the U.S. legally over political beliefs he deems counter to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Their targets have included hundreds of students and others with legal status, including those on student visas or holding green cards conferring permanent residency, as well as those who have sought asylum using legal channels.

Jorge Loweree, of the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, said Trump was doing something “that’s wholly new in historical terms.”

“It’s critical that people understand what the administration is doing,” said Loweree, the council’s managing director of programs and strategy. “We have an administration that believes they can disappear who they want, where they want, to anywhere they want.”

Loweree argued that even if voters in November rejected what they saw as chaos at the border, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that they support these very draconian measures that are being implemented today.”

Few elected Republicans are speaking out, though some of Trump’s outside allies have criticized what they see as overreach.

Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host who endorsed Trump late in the campaign, voiced alarm at the case of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela with no criminal record who was among those sent to El Salvador’s maximum-security CECOT prison.

“You gotta get scared that people who are not criminals are getting like lassoed up and deported and sent to like El Salvador prisons,” Rogan told his listeners. “That’s horrific. And again, that’s bad for the cause. Like the cause is let’s get the gang members out. Everybody agrees. But let’s not (have) innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs.”

Signs of change?

The April AP-NORC poll found that about half of Americans say Trump has “gone too far” when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, compared with about 6 in 10 who say he’s “gone too far” on imposing new tariffs on other countries.

It found Americans split on mass deportations, with about 4 in 10 in favor of deporting all immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and a similar share opposed. The percentage who support mass deportations is down slightly from an AP-NORC poll conducted in January, just before Trump took office.

Still, about one-third of U.S. adults say Trump’s actions have been “about right” on immigration, and about 2 in 10 think he hasn’t gone far enough.

One case that has gained traction nationally is that of Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident from El Salvador who was sent to CECOT despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation. Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang, a claim Abrego Garcia’s attorneys deny, and noted that his wife once sought a protective order against him.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has said he will not let Abrego Garcia leave the country.

More Democrats have traveled to El Salvador to highlight the case. And people angry about the situation have confronted Republican lawmakers, including at a contentious town hall Wednesday hosted by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, during which several members of the audience shouted at him to push for Abrego Garcia’s return.

The White House has embraced the fight. “A request for Democrats — please continue to make defending criminal illegal immigrants your top messaging point,” wrote Trump’s director of communications, Steven Cheung.

Some in the party have urged it to steer clear. Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., called the case a “distraction” from issues such as tariffs that have emerged as a bigger weakness for Trump.

“This is the debate (Republicans) want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it,” he said of Republicans on his podcast. “It’s a tough case, because,” he said, it risks people wondering, “are they defending MS-13?”

But Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, is urging Democrats to seize on the case. He says border issues are “much more nuanced than ‘immigration good for Trump, bad for Democrats'” and believes that voters are on their side.

“If we can’t stand up against the illegal rendition of the father of a U.S. child to a prison known for torture, then I don’t really know what we’re doing,” he said.

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Associated Press polling editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.