Ice Touts Record Deportations As Polls Show Voters Soured On Trump’s Crackdown

Immigration and Customs Enforcement touted record-breaking deportation and arrest numbers Thursday, the week after bruising midterm losses for Republicans in which many voters said President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown was too aggressive.

The agency said it arrested more than 491,000 people and deported 483,200 in fiscal 2026. The deportation count surpassed last year’s record of 442,640.

The pace of the arrests picked up over the summer, with ICE reporting nearly 51,000 arrests in August, breaking a monthly record it had just previously set in July. The agency made more than 48,000 arrests in September.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives,” DHS chief Markwayne Mullin said in a statement accompanying the announcement.

Signs of voter unease with the administration's crackdown were already evident even among some of Trump’s own voters heading into the midterms. A September POLITICO Poll found that 31% of 2024 Trump voters who didn’t identify as MAGA, along with 14% who did, said his deportation campaign was too aggressive.

After last week’s elections, 59% of voters said the Trump administration had gone too far on immigration enforcement, according to national exit polling published by NBC News, with 68% of Hispanic voters sharing the sentiment.

An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to a questions about whether the shifting public sentiment would affect their efforts going forward.

Following the GOP’s midterm shellacking, Trump acknowledged his deportation policy had come off as “too tough” to some voters. And he floated the possibility of a deal with Democrats on immigration in a “60 Minutes” interview.

But he appeared to backtrack this week, defending his immigration measures and ruling out any agreement that would include “amnesty.”

Trump also elevated Stephen Miller, a key architect of his mass deportation campaign, to White House chief of staff — a move that frustrated some Republicans as the party reckoned with midterm losses and a drop in support among Latino voters.

Meanwhile, immigration hard-liners welcomed Miller’s promotion, with some telling POLITICO they saw it as a chance to step up enforcement at farms, factories and other workplaces that employ immigrants without legal authorization.