As 2026 got underway and much of the country was mortified by the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the public backlash was swift and quantifiable. An Economist/YouGov poll found that a 47% plurality of Americans said Immigration and Customs Enforcement was making Americans less safe, while a 46% plurality said ICE should be abolished altogether.
A Quinnipiac poll released around the same time found that 57% of Americans disapproved of the way ICE was enforcing immigration laws.
The need for reform seemed obvious. In fact, an NBC News poll released in February found nearly 3 in 4 U.S. adults supported either “reforming” or “abolishing” the agency.
Democratic officials seized on those public attitudes and demanded that Congress impose new restrictions and safeguards on federal immigration agencies as part of pending spending bills that fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Four months later, the Republican majority ignored the polls, circumvented Democratic lawmakers, and narrowly approved a spending package that will fund ICE and CBP for the remainder of Donald Trump’s second term, throwing an additional $70 billion at immigration enforcement. (The party used the budget reconciliation process, which prevented Senate Democrats from imposing a 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.)