A group of President Donald Trump’s top allies has formed a coalition to push his team to resume its aggressive anti-immigration operation, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in cities, instead of focusing solely on deporting violent criminals.
The Mass Deportation Coalition, which includes MAGA figures, conservative groups and think tanks close to Trump’s administration, wants to see the president deport all undocumented migrants in the country.
Targeting only violent criminals, gang members, and terrorists is a “Clinton-Obama-Biden policy” that has “historically been a disastrous failure,” the group said.
After the deaths of two American citizens at the hands of federal immigration agents in Minnesota in January, the Trump administration has pivoted its messaging on immigration and overhauled its leadership, with border czar Tom Homan replacing “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino, and the ousting of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The coalition commissioned polling, conducted by a firm Trump has used in his presidential elections, to back its anti-immigration ideology and said that doubling down on the deportation push will ensure Republicans will win the 2026 midterm elections, Politico reports.
According to the poll carried out by McLaughlin & Associates, 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support the deportation of any migrant who enters the U.S. illegally, and 58 percent said they supported deporting all eligible migrants, not only violent criminals.
Trump voters from the last election were asked whether they supported Trump’s goal of exceeding former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s deportation effort in the 1950s — the largest in U.S. history that saw around one-third of illegal migrants leave the country.
In response, 87 percent said they supported that goal.
The poll also found that 74 percent of Trump voters would be more likely to vote for the Republican candidate for Congress if the president exceeded one million deportations of illegal migrants in 2026.
Chris Chmielenski, president of the conservative Immigration Accountability Project and a partner of the coalition, told Politico that Trump voters “don’t just support it, they expect it” from the administration.
“This is a good way to re-energize the base as we move into the midterms, the same way that Trump was able to do so in the lead up to the 2024 general election,” Chmielenski added.
The group’s poll was at odds with a recent Fox News survey that found nearly six in ten of its viewers disapprove of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with almost half of voters wanting to slash the agency’s funding.
The study also found that disapproval of ICE’s activities is at a record high compared to any Fox poll conducted since 2018. Just 42 percent of respondents approve of the federal agency’s performance.
It follows an internal Department of Homeland Security analysis, obtained by CBS News last month, that confirmed the share of immigrants with violent criminal histories arrested and targeted for deportation by the Trump administration is comparatively lower than the shares of detainees with nonviolent criminal histories or no previous arrests.
Less than 14 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and other agencies over the first year of Trump’s second presidency had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied that the Trump administration was changing its immigration enforcement agenda.
“President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,” Jackson said in a statement. “As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, approximately 70 percent of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records.”
Jackson added that approximately three million illegal migrants had left the U.S. because of Trump’s policies.
