With the midterm election season heating up, Democrats are maintaining an all-out assault against President Donald Trump's widely supported efforts to deport illegal alien criminals.
Minneapolis has become ground zero for the resistance as radical protestors have impeded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations, prompting the president to dispatch more federal agents to Minnesota.
Some poll analyses show Trump's approval has declined in recent months, and Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, thinks the Democrats have come to believe their own press releases "about how the public is resisting evil orange man and all that kind of stuff."
"To some degree, I think they believe that there's this undercurrent of opposition to Trump, when, in fact, I think his polling numbers went up a little bit over the past couple of weeks," Krikorian notes. "It's not as though he's uniquely problematic and that everybody agrees with the Democrats, because they really are on the 20% side of a whole bunch of 80-20 issues."
Multiple polls and surveys highlight the wide partisan divide in public opinion on illegal immigration and related policies.
A majority of U.S. adults think controlling or reducing illegal immigration is important, but how to do that is what divides people. Republicans tend to favor tougher enforcement measures like deportations and stricter border security. Democrats tend to support easier legal pathways for immigrants and less punitive enforcement.
Meanwhile, the Democrats only need about three seats to gain majority in the House.
"I think a lot of the Democrats figure they want to move as far left as they can, thinking that they're going to win the majority almost regardless of what they say – at least the majority in the House – and then they can impeach Trump every afternoon at 4:00, which is what they're going to do," he observes.
Historical midterms typically favor the out‑of‑power party, which in this case is Democrats, and Krikorian finds it "entirely possible" for the them to win control of the House in November.
