Poll: California Democrats Want To Disband Ice

California Democrats overwhelmingly want to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid backlash to Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, according to a new poll by POLITICO and its partners.

The diverse and heavily Democratic state was an early staging ground for the president’s aggressive deployment of federal troops and ICE agents, with the administration’s targeting of Los Angeles previewing a divisive Minnesota operation this winter in which federal agents fatally shot two people.

Partisan rancor toward the White House’s policy stands out in the aftermath, according to a new UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research-POLITICO poll of California voters. While the state’s Republican minority largely backed Trump, Democrats vehemently opposed his agenda — so much so that two-thirds said ICE should be “completely disbanded” in light of the events in Minnesota.

That sentiment has colored California’s governor race, with Democratic candidates calling for the agency’s dissolution or proposing California refuse to hire ICE agents. But the discomfort with ICE tactics among voters was not restricted to Democrats. Equal two-fifths pluralities of independents said the agency should be either disbanded or reformed, and a third of Republicans said it should be reformed.

“There’s significant concern among people in both parties about the behavior of this organization,” said Amy E. Lerman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley who helped design the questions. “It's hard to know if the ‘disband’ folks are saying we don’t need anyone to do this at a federal level or disband ICE given how rogue or far it’s gone in Minnesota.”

But Californians have mixed views about how best to rein in federal agents. The state’s main policy response this year to ICE — legislation banning federal agents from wearing masks, which has been blocked in court — drew tepid 49 percent support. Voters were more likely to support requiring ICE agents to wear body cameras (62 percent) or hew to a code of conduct like local law enforcement does (56 percent).

The ICE pushback reflected a broader rejection within the state of Trump’s deportation agenda. Substantial majorities of voters opposed deploying federal troops to cities that do not cooperate with federal enforcement (61 percent) and backed offering undocumented immigrants paths to citizenship or permanent residency (62 percent).
Two-thirds said “maintaining California's economic growth and workforce” was more important than “enforcing immigration laws and removing undocumented immigrants.”

Yet the findings also demonstrated voters are weighing their concerns about mass deportations against a desire for border security. A clear majority said it is important for the country to “secure its borders and stop the flow of illegal immigration,” including two-thirds of independents and 41 percent of Democrats. But 71 percent of voters surveyed, including a 45 percent plurality of Republicans, said California’s economy would suffer if millions of undocumented immigrants disappeared from the workforce.

“There’s two conversations happening: One is about keeping the flow of illegal migrants limited, and the other is figuring out what you do with people who are already attached to the economy,” Lerman said. “This recognition that people are working and part of the economy if they’re already here is really distinguishable from this policy question of closing the borders.”

These data come from parallel surveys of California voters and policy influencers, fielded byTrueDot, the AI-accelerated research platform, in collaboration with the Citrin Center at UC Berkeley and POLITICO. Interviews for the voter survey were conducted online in English and Spanish between Feb. 25 and March 3, 2026, among a sample of 1,220 registered voters selected at random by Verasight. Voter data were weighted using the Current Population Survey and data from the California Report of Registration.

From Feb. 24 to March 3, 2026, a parallel study was conducted in partnership with POLITICO among its audience of key political and policy influencers in California. The audience was defined based on job title and organizational affiliation and included state and local government employees, political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers, consultants, business decision-makers and subject matter experts.

The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percent for the voter survey and plus or minus 3.7 percent for the influencers.