January 13, 2026 - 12:30pm
As the Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement across the country, many Americans, especially Democrats, have grown outraged by the perception that ICE is acting with impunity. But as emotions run high, it’s crucial that the party does not let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. Troublingly, some are starting to embrace a familiar slogan: “abolish ICE.”
One Democratic polling analyst last week highlighted this trend in a piece provocatively titled: “Support for abolishing ICE hits a new high.” A tracking poll shows that support for the idea has grown significantly since early 2025, reaching an eight-year high of 42%. While independents contributed to the shift, the majority of the change came from Democrats. Support among them has surged from 40% on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration to 69% today.
It is possible that this poll overstates actual support for abolishing the agency. Respondents could be engaging in what pollsters call expressive responding, a phenomenon wherein people give survey answers that are more partisan than their actual beliefs. For many, politics is at least in part about fitting in, and their endorsement of slogans like this could be due to peer effects. Some of it could also be due to thermostatic public opinion — voters reacting to government policy shifts like a thermostat. Of course, some may genuinely support the policy, too.
Still, it’s likely that this slogan will gain further traction if reports of ICE brutality continue. Republicans, in turn, are poised to seize on it by portraying Democrats as extremists in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections. Although Democrats are well positioned for victory in November, the spread of this sentiment within the party — even if confined to its base — could introduce an unnecessary risk to their efforts to both regain control and impose a substantive check on the president.
The most obvious risk would be in districts and states that broke for Trump in 2024 and which Democrats need to win to flip House and Senate seats. Take Ohio, where former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown is running again and where Trump won by 11 points last time. A December poll found that a majority (53%) of voters there “think mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in Ohio are a good thing for the state”. If Democrats are seen to undermine this effort, it won’t go down well with the state’s population.
None of this means that Democrats can’t or shouldn’t talk about ICE. It is true that Americans’ disapproval of the agency is climbing: last February, its net approval was +16, but today it sits at -13, with 40% of voters now “strongly disapproving” of its job performance. A November YouGov poll also found that a majority of Americans (52%) say ICE’s tactics are “too forceful”, including 60% of independents, and huge majorities believe the agency uses “unnecessary force” against US citizens, immigrants authorised to live in the US, and even immigrants who are not authorised to live there.
At the same time, the public still doesn’t totally trust Democrats to handle the immigration issue. In a survey from the centre-left think tank Third Way last autumn, voters in swing districts trusted Republicans more than Democrats to handle border security by a margin of 56% to 36%, likely due in part to lingering frustrations over Joe Biden’s border policies. Americans aren’t totally against deportations, either: a majority — including 55% of Latinos — continue to say that at least some immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported.
Rather than embracing “abolition”, an idea that has historically proved polarising and risky, Democrats would be wise to focus on “accountability”. This could mean tough oversight of both ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, including holding hearings to push ICE Director Todd Lyons and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem into weeding out the bad apples in their ranks. If Trump’s 2024 victory and second term have shown anything, it is that Americans are currently very open to holding government institutions to account. No agency or department is above scrutiny, including ICE and DHS.
At the same time, promising more oversight must also go hand in hand with providing a real plan to address voters’ continued concerns about immigration. Part of the reason why many of them don’t take Democrats seriously on immigration is because they don’t think the party is committed to enforcing immigration laws — an idea which has some basis. There is an opening here for the party to gain back lost ground and check the excesses of Trump’s deportation policies, but Democrats must not succumb to their emotions or the trendy rallying cries of the moment.
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