President Donald Trump’s got a new problem. It seems hard to believe, but some of his own base thinks his administration hasn’t sufficiently cracked down hard enough on illegal immigration.
News emerged last week that the White House wanted to soften the president’s reputation on immigration enforcement by reportedly discouraging the party from talking about “mass deportations” and suggesting a rhetorical focus on removing violent criminals. Immediately, a group of pro-Trump immigration hawks began a lobbying effort to deter Trump from even pursuing his mostly cosmetic attempt to moderate on the issue. Inconveniently for the president, this group calls itself the “Mass Deportation Coalition.”
The president has a problem on his hands over an issue he was once most confident.
The infighting illuminates a striking phenomenon. For once, it is not the Democrats who appear to be torn up about immigration as a wedge issue that could weaken their coalition. Instead, it is the GOP for whom immigration is becoming a point of internal tension, and posing a dilemma to its leader. While there’s no reason to think Trump will ever become truly moderate on the issue, he will be vexed by questions of how to approach what was once one of his strongest policy issues ahead as the midterms near. And it also suggests there’s an opening for Democrats to go on offense.
According to Politico, the Mass Deportation Coalition includes “Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump; Erik Prince, a Trump ally and former Blackwater CEO; as well as a number of conservative think-tanks and lobbying groups close to the Trump administration including the Heritage Foundation, Federation for American Immigration Reform, American Moment, and the Claremont Institute.”
The group’s position is that Trump has been too selective in whom it targets for arrest, and that it should target a much larger population of undocumented immigrants to achieve his campaign promises. (Mind you, even in Trump’s “softer touch” month in February, more than 40% of the people Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested in February had no criminal record, and he was still arresting people at four times the rate than President Joe Biden did in his last year in office.)
Politico reports that the Mass Deportation Coalition commissioned a poll from a Trump aligned-pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, which found data points that back the idea of both the country and Trump’s base as unwaveringly hardline on immigration. One of its findings is that 66% of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrant who enter the country illegally. Another is that 87% of Trump 2024 voters surveyed want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. (That operation was named after an ethnic slur and was a humanitarian disaster.)
That survey paints a more right-wing-friendly picture of national immigration policy preferences than most national polling in recent months suggests. As I noted in a recent piece, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in January found that about 6 in 10 Americans said Trump has “gone too far” in sending federal immigration agents into U.S. cities, and that a similar share disapproved of Trump’s overall handling of immigration. And Republicans have also shown signs of disenchantment: A Politico poll conducted in January found that 1 in 5 voters who supported Trump in 2024 think his mass deportation campaign is too aggressive. Trump has sensed this shift in mainstream polling and even an emerging unease among some in his own party — and accordingly has recently incrementally scaled back ICE arrests and shaken up his immigration policy leadership. Now the Mass Deportation Coalition wants to whisper in Trump’s ear that going softer on immigration is a mistake and that he should trust his previous instincts — or risk betraying his base and misreading the national mood. It’s possible that these activists could persuade him to swivel back to a maximalist posture, or go even harder than ever before. Regardless of how Trump decides to act over the coming months or years, it’s becoming clear that the president has a problem on his hands over an issue he was once most confident. Some parts of his base support and prefer his immigration program at its absolute ugliest, including de facto military occupations of cities, racially profiling people for arrests and racist commentary about immigrants from parts of the world Trump doesn’t approve of. But the voters who supported him in 2024 that aren’t die-hard MAGA appear less comfortable with it, even if they believe in strong immigration enforcement. That could hurt Republicans in the midterm elections and unravel Trump’s governing trifecta. Democrats have often been split on resisting Trump’s agenda on immigration, and some of them even supported his hardline immigration legislation shortly after he took office. This apprehension stems from the fear that appearing to be dovish on immigration is an electoral killer. But Trump has rendered hawkishness on immigration toxic. With Trump on his back foot, they have an opportunity to identify Trump with the most extreme elements of his coalition, and mingle pro-democracy arguments with reasonable and humane immigration policy. They ought to take it.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
