Survey of Chicagoans: 65% say President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown has 'gone too far'
Published in News & Features
Sixty-five percent of Chicagoans think the Trump administration’s recent federal immigration enforcement activities have “gone too far,” according to results from a survey commissioned by the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and conducted by NORC as part of the University of Chicago’s ChicagoSpeaks panel.
But Chicagoans were sharply divided on enforcement — and the city’s sanctuary status — by race, income and age.
The strongest opposition to federal enforcement and support for the city’s sanctuary policy was among people who were white, wealthier and living on the city’s North Side, the survey found.
The survey of 1,230 Chicagoans, provided exclusively to the Tribune by the Mansueto Institute, was conducted between Nov. 24 and Dec. 8, just after federal deportation efforts in the Chicago region, called Operation Midway Blitz, concluded. The poll’s margin of error was 3.9%.
Asked to complete the sentence “when it comes to deporting individuals who are in the country without legal documentation, would you say recent federal immigration enforcement activities in Chicago have …” 64.9% responded “gone too far,” 12.8% responded “been about right,” 8.4% said had “not gone far enough,” and a little less than 14% said they were unsure.
The figures are slightly higher than a national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in mid-October. That poll found 53% of respondents said President Donald Trump’s administration was doing “too much” when it comes to deporting immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally, and 36% said it was “about the right amount.”
A recent national CNN poll conducted by SSRS reported that 51% of respondents thought ICE enforcement actions were making cities less safe, whereas 31% thought those actions were making cities safer. That poll also reported that more people thought Trump’s deportation efforts had gone too far, up from 45% last February to 52% now.
At the same time the Chicago survey kicked off, a federal judge had issued a scathing opinion criticizing immigration agents’ use-of-force tactics against arrestees, protesters and bystanders during Midway Blitz — from pointing guns to releasing tear gas and flash-bang grenades — and accused Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino and agents of lying about Chicagoans’ actions.
In the poll, 74.3% of people living in the north-central part of the city said they thought recent immigration enforcement activities had gone too far, while 79.3% of people with incomes above $100,000 reported the same. The feds conducted raids in Lakeview and Lincoln Park in late October, deploying tear gas on a residential street. Meanwhile, only 53.4% of respondents who reported earning $30,000 or less annually — a segment of society the Trump administration has long argued has seen their job prospects hurt by immigration — said they believed the Trump administration had gone too far in immigration enforcement.
For people over the age of 75, a generation that grew up in the wake of World War II and during the Civil Rights movement, 76.4% similarly believed enforcement went “too far.” That was the highest opposition among any age group over 18.
The topline results were unsurprising to Chris Berry, the faculty director at Mansueto, who also teaches at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.
“We know Chicago is a liberal city and Midway Blitz didn’t make a positive impression on Chicagoans for many reasons,” he said. But the gaps between white, Black and Hispanic respondents were “massive,” Berry said.
There was a 20-point gap between white and Black respondents who thought enforcement had “gone too far” — 75.5% versus 55.6%. For Hispanic respondents, that figure was 62.5%.
Asked how strongly they supported the city’s ordinance “that limits city agencies and employees from cooperating with federal civil immigration enforcement,” 75.5% of white respondents said they strongly or somewhat supported it, while 44.7% of Black and 52.1% of Hispanic respondents said the same.
Black and Hispanic respondents were also more ambivalent about the city’s ordinance barring cooperation with federal immigration enforcement actions. A total of 40.5% of Black respondents and 33.7% of Hispanic respondents reported being unsure whether they supported the sanctuary policy, or that they neither supported nor opposed it.
The Trump administration’s deployment of ICE and border patrol to Chicago as part of his sweeping program to remove immigrants from the U.S. comes a year after Mayor Brandon Johnson declared an end to a migrant crisis that saw Texas’ Republican governor send busloads of largely Venezuelan migrants to Chicago and other major cities run by Democratic leaders.
The migrant crisis was one of the more racially divisive in recent Chicago history. Several members of the City Council’s Black Caucus, echoing constituents, resented the resources and attention devoted to the crisis that had not been marshaled for their neighborhoods in recent years. Similar intra-racial tensions also arose between new arrivals and longtime immigrants about the disparity in government support they received.
The survey also asked how satisfied respondents were with the local response. Across the board, a majority were either satisfied or strongly satisfied with the city, state and Chicago Public Schools’ response to the federal campaign. A greater share of respondents — 24% — had no opinion about CPS’ response.
Dissatisfaction with the local response ranged from approximately 30% to 35%. Berry acknowledged that it could encompass both progressive frustrations that either the city or state was not doing enough to resist ICE, including by allowing local law enforcement to respond to protests.
Despite overall satisfaction with the city’s response to Midway Blitz and support for its sanctuary status, Johnson’s approval numbers have not budged much compared with the two previous quarters of the survey. Johnson’s approval remains at about 25%, Berry said.
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