WASHINGTON — As the Supreme Court takes up President Trump's push to end birthright citizenship today, a new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that less than a third of all Americans want to drop the longstanding principle that any child born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen, even as other parts of the White House's immigration crackdown draw wider support.
The poll shows that public attitudes toward Trump's hardline immigration policies remain remarkably stable so far, though the data also show subtle signs of softening in support for some of those policies since January.
"I agree with what he's trying to do," said poll respondent Randy Crabtree of Vermillion, Ohio, in a follow-up interview. Crabtree, a Republican who voted for Trump last year, supports the White House's push to deport anyone in the country illegally and to send alleged members of criminal gangs to a counterterrorism prison in El Salvador.
"Removing those that are gang-affiliated and sending them to the prison down there in El Salvador, I wholeheartedly applaud," Crabtree said.
The White House says the deported men have ties to Tren de Aragua and other gangs, but has released little evidence to support its allegations. Friends and family members of many of the deported men dispute that they're gang members, saying they were targeted largely for their tattoos.
Nearly half of poll respondents say they support quickly deporting alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua under a seldom-used 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act, while only 31% say they're opposed. Among Republicans, that support jumps to nearly four out of five; for Democrats, it's about one in four.
Public opinion on Trump's proposal to end birthright citizenship, which the vast majority of legal scholars believe is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, has shifted very little since he announced the plan in an executive order in January. 53% of poll respondents oppose the idea, with only 28% in favor. That's virtually unchanged since an NPR/Ipsos poll in February, when 31% supported the idea of ending birthright citizenship and 54% opposed it.
The latest NPR/Ipsos poll was conducted from May 9 to 11 with 1,019 respondents. The margin of error is 3.7% for all respondents.
A subtle shift on hardline deportation policies?
The public is more evenly split when it comes to Trump's promise to build the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.
In our latest poll, 40% of respondents say they support "mass deportation of everyone who is in the country without legal status," with 42% opposed. That's virtually the same as the split in our previous poll, when 44% were in favor of mass deportation and 42% were opposed.
But that decline was more pronounced among political independents. Their support for mass deportation has fallen from 44% in February to 37% now — a drop of 7 percentage points, which is within the poll's margin of error.
Still, it suggests that some Americans who voted for Trump last year may be having second thoughts about his high-profile crackdown on immigrants, which has included workplace and courthouse raids and sped-up deportations that have drawn scores of legal challenges, and raised deep concerns about due process and the constitutionality of many of his actions.
"I think it's a little bit too far," said Crystal Thomas, a poll respondent from Louisville, Ky. Thomas describes herself as a Republican-leaning independent who voted for Trump despite some misgivings because he was "the lesser of two evils for me," as she put it in a follow-up interview.
But Thomas said she has watched with growing concern as immigrants who've lived and worked in her community for years have been swept up in the Trump administration's crackdown.
"It's too much," Thomas said. "They're just doing this stuff, I think, to pump up numbers like, 'Oh, hey, we got this many people out of the country,' and everyone's just cheering them on like, 'oh wow, you guys are doing such a good job.' But at the end of the day, these are real people and these are real families that they're ripping apart."
Deep divisions over due process
The poll also posed a series of questions about due process, and whether respondents believe that immigrants here without legal status deserve the same legal protections as American citizens to defend their rights and to have a fair hearing when their freedom is at stake. The answers reveal a wide range of views that sometimes appear to be in conflict with each other.
"The American public sees a lot of shades of gray around immigration," said Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos.
"One of the big questions here — this issue of who is deemed an American, and how we proceed with immigrants who don't have legal status — is one of the biggest political fault lines in our society today," Newall said.
On the one hand, the poll found that 45% of Americans say that First Amendment protections for free speech should apply equally to immigrants, regardless of their legal status. And less than a third of respondents support canceling visas for international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.
But on the other hand, 46% of poll respondents agreed with Trump's complaint that it would take too long to give trials to millions of immigrants without legal status before deporting them. And nearly as many said that constitutional rights should not apply to immigrants in the country illegally.
"I think anyone that has entered our country illegally has no rights under our Constitution. The Constitution was written and given for the citizens of the land," said Crabtree, the poll respondent from Ohio.
The Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution say that no "person" can be "deprived of life, liberty, or property" without due process, and do not mention citizenship.
Poll respondent Catherine Welty says she's dismayed by what she sees as the erosion of those fundamental rights.
"It's very scary. That's not the way I thought America worked," said Welty, who lives near Phoenix.
Welty, a Democratic voter, says she's troubled by the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, as well as other Venezuelan men who were quickly removed without a chance to dispute allegations of gang affiliation.
And Welty, who describes herself as multiracial, worries that her 20-year-old son could be mistaken for an immigrant without legal status.
"They just don't seem to care if mistakes are happening, and they're doubling down and they're like, 'well, that's too bad for them' kind of thing," Welty said. "It's shocking that that would happen without any sort of due process."
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