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A new survey — conducted after President Donald Trump deployed National Guard and Marine troops to Los Angeles to quell protests against ramped-up immigration enforcement — reveals more Americans do not approve of either move.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 1,136 American adults on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. And while it found broad support for increasing the pace of deportations for people not in the United States legally, when respondents were asked whether Trump has gone too far with recent efforts to carry out mass arrests of migrants in urban centers, 49 percent agreed that the recent arrests have gone too far, while 40 percent said they had not.
Americans surveyed also had a largely negative view of how Trump has responded to the protests with sending in military troops to Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, since the stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids began last week.
The poll showed that 50 percent of American adults do not approve of the administration’s response compared with just 35 percent saying they approved.
Similarly, 49 percent of respondents said Trump should not push for arrests of local officials who push back against federal immigration enforcement, while 35 percent said the administration should arrest defiant officials.
At the same time, the survey revealed that Americans have a dim view of the protests that have spread from Los Angeles to other major cities in response to the anti-immigrant raids, with some degenerating into violence that has seen people injured and property damaged,
When asked if the protests have gone too far, 46 percent said yes, compared with just 38 percent who said the protests have not gone too far and 16 percent who offered no opinion either way.
But Americans also supported Trump’s use of the military to bring order to violent protests by a margin of 48 percent agreeing to 41 percent disagreeing, with 11 percent saying they were unsure.
The survey results come just as the first 200 U.S. Marines out of a battalion of 700 arrived in Los Angeles, joining National Guard troops already deployed to the city by the Trump administration.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sued the administration to block Trump’s use of the National Guard, and on Thursday a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the president had broken the law by bypassing Newsom when calling the guard into federal service.
But that ruling is on hold after an appeals court ruled that Donald Trump can retain temporary control of the Guard pending a more comprehensive hearing on the matter this Tuesday.
The late-night decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came swiftly after U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump’s action was “illegal” and violated the Tenth Amendment, stating that the president must return control of 4,000 troops to Newsom.
Additional protests against the ongoing workplace raids have occurred across the nation and are expected to continue through the weekend as part of the “No Kings” movement, coinciding with the president’s birthday parade in Washington, D.C., which celebrates the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.
