Nearly half of Republican voters believe the military should be used to detain undocumented immigrants in camps until they can be deported, a new poll has found.
President-elect Donald Trump has already suggested that he would deploy the military to support immigration raids, as well as use a law from 1798 to place immigrants in camps.
The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found in a recent poll that Trump’s base appears to support the plans even as most Americans likely oppose them.
While 46 percent of Republicans support deploying the military in the immigrant operations, only 19 percent of independents and eight percent of Democrats back the idea.
The survey found that Americans with authoritarian views were about six times more likely to support putting undocumented immigrants in camps, compared to those who don’t support authoritarianism, by a margin of 48 percent to eight percent.
The poll also found that “voters who score very high or high on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWAS) report strongly supporting Trump (82 percent), while those voters who score very low or low overwhelmingly supported [Vice President Kamala] Harris (79 percent),” according to PRRI.
The president of the polling company was taken aback by the results.
“There have been questions in the Trump era where I’ve thought … I can’t believe that we need to know the answer to this question,” PRRI president and founder Robert Jones told Axios.
“I guess the good news is that three-quarters of the country rejects this idea that we should be putting immigrants in the country illegally into internment camps guarded by the military,” he added.
Jones noted that the bad news of the poll is that almost half of those who see themselves as a member of a major political party do support deploying the military to round up immigrants.
Trump recently told Time magazine that he’s open to using camps to hold immigrants within the U.S. He suggested that 21 million people be deported, something set to require new detention centers, even as studies show there are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center has found that there are about 24.5 million noncitizen immigrants in the country, which includes those awaiting asylum rulings or are in the U.S. legally in other ways. They could be inappropriately and illegally swept up in Trump’s crackdown
There’s a backlog of some 3.7 million court cases in the immigration system, which, at the current rate, will take four years to complete. Under Trump’s policies, that could increase to 16 years, Axios found.
Interviews for the survey were conducted online between November 8 and December 2.
