Yesica was born in Michoacán, Mexico, the state that is known as the landing place for monarch butterflies. Every year, millions of butterflies migrate nearly 3,000 miles from Canada and the United States to Michoacán, where they cover fir trees and turn the sky orange.
Yesica traveled the other way in 2000, when she was 17. She was smuggled across the U.S. border with her parents, who hoped to escape poverty by working on farms. She initially took jobs as a plant nursery worker, a housekeeper, and a dishwasher.
Since the 2024 election, Yesica has worked with mixed-status families who fear losing their children if President Donald Trump fulfills his vow of mass deportation. The new Trump administration has said the plan to round up the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. without documentation could be set in motion as soon as Jan. 21. Upon being sworn in for his second term on Jan. 20, Trump also signed a slew of immigration-related executive orders, declaring a national emergency at the border, suspending refugee resettlement, and ending asylum, among other actions.
Yesica’s parents, sister, and partner are undocumented. Her children’s father was temporarily detained by immigration authorities 10 years ago.
“This issue of deportation is more palpable than people can imagine for me,” said Yesica, whose last name is not being included for her family’s safety. “My children’s father was caught by immigration and imprisoned for 21 days, and my children cried every day. So I personally know what it feels like to have a family separation.”
Yesica’s community has already experienced a Trump presidency that brought contentious immigration policies such as the separation of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and a travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries.
But this time, Yesica and her colleagues worry that Trump won’t face the same backlash from Democrats, Republicans, and the American public. In 2018, a widespread outcry prompted his backtrack from the “zero tolerance” policy of family separations. Now, a wave of research suggests a dramatic shift in public opinion: Since Trump’s first term, many Americans have turned against immigration.
A majority of Americans—55%—want to curb immigration, according to a Gallup poll last summer. That’s a jump from 30% in 2020 and the highest percentage Gallup had recorded since the early 2000s, when nativism surged after 9/11.
Various aspects of Trump’s anti-immigration plans have gained in popularity. Half of Americans say they support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a 2024 Axios/Harris poll. That survey also found that 30% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans want to end birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. via the 14th Amendment. Trump signed an executive order on Monday to overturn this constitutional right, which immigrant rights advocates and attorneys general in 18 states are already challenging in court.
Trump’s proposed border wall, a hallmark of his foray into politics, has never been more popular. During his first presidency, Trump’s efforts to push the wall through led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. But since 2023, polls from Quinnipiac University, Fox News, and Monmouth University have shown public support for a southern border wall at between 52% and 57%.
Americans are also split over the idea of putting undocumented immigrants in military-guarded camps while they await deportation, according to a Public Religion Research Institute survey in October. Trump has proposed removing undocumented immigrants by using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the arrest and deportation of people from so-called enemy countries during wartime. The law was last invoked by President Franklin Roosevelt to place Japanese, German, and Italian nationals in internment camps during World War II.
As support for immigration has declined, so has the political and financial backing behind groups that advocate for immigrant rights, especially in red states, said Adriana Rivera, the communications director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
“We have a lot of funders that are pulling away from work that supports immigrant families, workers who are immigrants, children who are U.S. citizens but have immigrant parents,” Rivera said. “So that’s making our work a lot harder.”
At the National Immigrant Inclusion Conference in Houston last December, Rivera said she heard many leaders try to give hope to their peers by saying that immigrant groups have “been here before.” But Rivera thought differently.
“We’re going to do the best that we can to protect people, but I don’t agree that we’ve been here before,” Rivera said. “Not like this, at least that I have seen in my lifetime.”
Why have Americans soured on immigration?
The record number of border crossings at the end of 2023 was hard to miss. Political and economic crises, wars and gang violence, and natural disasters worsened by climate change all drove migration—not only from Latin America but also of displaced people across the world. In many media reports and political ads, images of chaos at the border were packaged as a breakdown of the nation’s social order and a threat to its very identity.
The number of migrants crossing the border plummeted in 2024 following an executive order by former President Joe Biden that drastically limited asylum claims. But the threat of outsiders proved particularly powerful in an election year when post-pandemic inflation and other economic issues were top of mind for many voters, said Zeke Hernandez, a professor who studies immigration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
Any time you have economic discomfort, especially among working-class people, immigrants often get blamed.
Zeke Hernandez, Wharton School of Business professor
“Any time you have economic discomfort, especially among working-class people, immigrants often get blamed,” Hernandez said.
Trump also captured a real concern about the disordered way in which the U.S. receives immigrants, Hernandez said. That chaos extends beyond the border to an outdated and dysfunctional immigration system. The country has not changed or expanded its types of visas since 1990, despite the vast economic, demographic, and geopolitical developments of the last 35 years.
Hernandez likened the system to a highway that imposes a speed limit of 25 miles per hour—in other words, “people are going to break the law.”
“Do you know how many visas we have for carpenters and plumbers? Zero,” he said. “So there’s a need for millions of people with critical skills, for which our system simply does not have a way in.”
Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, looks at public opinion in the context of “thermostatic politics,” the formation of people’s views in opposition to a government’s rhetoric or policies. He believes that Trump thrust immigration into the polarized core of the U.S.
“For many years, immigration has not really been thermostatic,” Kustov said. “People were getting more positive towards immigration, including both conservatives and liberals. But since Trump took over in 2016, immigration has become a much more salient issue, much more important to people’s sense of politics and how they identify themselves.”
Immigration is an especially serious concern for those against it. Predominantly Republican voters who oppose immigration say it’s more personally important to them than predominantly Democratic voters who support it, Kustov found. That gives their views more political weight and often leaves immigrant rights groups to fend for themselves under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
For many, Trump’s dark imagery of migrants has been persuasive. His descriptions of a “migrant crime wave” and immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country” have filtered down: When asked about their greatest concerns about unauthorized immigration, Americans often reference crime rates and economic burdens.
But despite highly publicized singular cases of violence committed by migrants, there is no correlation between immigration and increased crime in the U.S., according to Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine. Kubrin, together with Graham Ousey, a sociologist at the College of William and Mary, did a meta-analysis of every study on the immigration-crime link over a 20-year period, culminating in their 2023 book, “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock.”
“Immigrants offend at a lower rate than their native-born peers, and this includes immigrants who are undocumented,” said Kubrin. In some places, she and Ousey saw that higher immigration rates led to lower rates of crime. Still, as part of a new executive order, the Trump administration is calling for the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who commit capital crimes.
From an economic perspective, Hernandez argues that immigrants are “net job creators and net wage increasers.” The premise that an influx of immigrant workers leads to lower pay for native-born people is a fallacy, he said, since immigrants spend their paychecks and contribute to a larger economy. Nor are the new arrivals interchangeable with existing workers: They bring new skills, networks, and ideas, creating a more complex economy with more job opportunities.
Immigrants also add greatly to the tax base, including undocumented immigrants, who paid an estimated $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022.
What kind of immigration do Americans want?
The research on how Americans think about immigration is a story of contradictions.
Sahana Mukherjee, the associate director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, released a survey with one such incongruity. She found that 43% of American voters said they supported mass deportation, while also saying that undocumented immigrants should be able to stay in the country legally.
“That’s an interesting percentage, right? That’s a pretty large share of folks who are saying both,” Mukherjee said. “To me, it’s basically highlighting how nuanced their views are.”
The inconsistency also reflects a deep confusion about what phrases like “mass deportation” and “a pathway to citizenship” mean, and what kind of immigration system Americans actually live in.
“We have so many different pathways, and they’re all contradictory to each other, and that’s not something that’s easy to understand, even for an immigration lawyer,” said Kustov.
According to Hernandez, people tend to like immigrants who are their neighbors—and often place them in a different category from those who they might think should be deported. Research shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe immigrants are good.
The idea of mass deportation for some, but not for others also runs through Adriana Rivera’s community in Florida. She said she has spoken with some Latin Americans who support deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records—but under a Trump administration, such Latin Americans will likely be viewed as “criminals” themselves.
At the nexus of criminal and immigration enforcement is a legally opaque world. Undocumented immigrants are punished by both systems, often facing harsher penalties, longer jail times, and deportation for minor offenses, along with financial exploitation through fees and fines to avoid being deported. These sanctions are not limited to the undocumented: In places where law enforcement partners with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Latinx people are racially profiled in traffic stops regardless of their citizenship status.
They’re not explaining that the simple fact of coming here—whether it’s through the border, through a legal process of asylum claim—they can consider you to be a criminal.
Adriana Rivera, ommunications director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition
“When you say we’re going to do away with the criminals, who’s against that? But they’re not explaining that the simple fact of coming here—whether it’s through the border, through a legal process of asylum claim—they can consider you to be a criminal if you do that,” said Rivera. “If I have Temporary Protected Status and you take it away from me, you’re now going to consider me a criminal,” she said, referring to the federal program that temporarily allows people from certain designated countries to live and work in the U.S.
Yesica said the backlogged, contradictory immigration system and divisive political messaging have also created rifts between Latinx communities, such as established Mexican groups and newly arrived Venezuelans. Some undocumented and mixed-status families feel overlooked as work permits long inaccessible to them are granted to recent asylees, even though the new immigrants typically have no better prospects of lasting stability in the U.S.
“There is a huge resentment from people in our community who have been living in this country for 15, 20, 30 years, who have not committed any crimes, who pay taxes, who are workers. They are thinking, ‘Oh, these people who recently arrived already have documentation,’” Yesica said. “So there is a lot of mistrust.”
Immigrant communities have experienced mass deportation policies before, and not just during Trump’s first term. Former President Obama deported more people than Trump through Secure Communities, a program that searched police databases for immigrants who could be deported. The policy had chilling effects on immigrants and lowered their participation in safety net programs, but it also hurt U.S. citizens.
“For about every million immigrants deported through Secure Communities, about 88,000 Americans lost jobs,” Hernandez said. “That’s because these undocumented immigrants are doing essential work that preserves a lot of American jobs.”
If Trump makes good on his promise to enact the largest deportation program in U.S. history, it will not just target immigrants, said Rivera. It will transform American life.
“This is going to happen to you, no matter how far removed you are,” said Rivera. “Whether it’s a co-worker who you didn’t know was a Temporary Protected Status recipient, and the company replaces him—maybe he’s your friend too. Or somebody who comes to your house to help with your children. Maybe it’s your kid’s favorite teacher, or it’s your doctor, or that surgeon you’re scheduled to go into surgery with in two months, who you trust because he knows your case like the back of his hand. This is going to touch you too.”
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