The American People Are Turning Against Stephen Miller’s Immigration Agenda

This has been a horrible few weeks, but we may finally be turning a corner.

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino is leaving Minneapolis as President Trump reshuffles his immigration enforcement strategy amid intense political backlash after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Trump has dispatched longtime border official Tom Homan to Minnesota to oversee ICE operations on the ground, and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott is also expected to join him. To be clear, Homan is still a hard-core anti-immigrant leader. Senator Chris Murphy told TNR’s Greg Sargent, “Tom Homan is not some avatar of restraint. He’s been lying through his teeth about what ICE has been doing since he was put on the job. He’s a fundamentally corrupt leader and somebody who has been cheerleading the brutality from the start.” In fact, Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein obtained a Border Patrol memo that their mission in Minneapolis is “steady state and expected to continue as planned.”

For many of us, watching the federal government’s response to the DHS murders in Minneapolis wasn’t just upsetting; it was traumatizing. Not because we didn’t expect violence, as we saw from the Trump administration, but because we watched it happen in public and then watched officials tell us not to believe what we could see with our own eyes.

State-sponsored political violence does something to us as Americans, especially when the message from those in charge is: “This was justified, this could happen again, and no one will be held accountable.”

If you’ve felt on edge these last few weeks, that’s a normal human response to what we’re seeing in our country. Because of the work of fearless legal observers, we all became witnesses to the horrific murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And we all know that Trump and his thugs lied about both.

The violence that we’re seeing from DHS in Minneapolis and other cities is meant to generate fear far beyond the immediate victims and spread anxiety through families, communities, and entire populations, including people who experience events only through images, video, and media coverage.

But we all know that strong community support is the best way to counter the political violence we’re witnessing from DHS, and by now we’ve all seen people step up to protect their neighbors and communities — not just in Minneapolis, but in cities, small towns, and rural towns across the country.

In moments like this, the best thing we can do is focus on the factors within our control, such as building small, grounded networks of people who share our values and are willing to support one another.

Building a strong, local community helps us stay steady when things feel uncertain and overwhelming. They create space for trust, care, and honest conversation, and they remind us that we don’t have to face difficult times alone.

We saw over the last few weeks in Minneapolis that when small groups of deeply connected community members band together, they can still turn back even the most violent and extreme MAGA Republicans. And each day we are growing stronger.

Day by day, more Americans, even many who stood by President Trump over the last decade, are recognizing and rejecting the unconstitutional atrocities committed by DHS and ICE.

Political scientists call incidents like this focusing events: highly visible moments that collapse abstract policy debates into concrete moral judgments.

While public resentment toward DHS has been growing since Kristi Noem first took over the agency, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis marked a turning point. The DHS violence in Minneapolis forced American voters to evaluate Stephen Miller’s immigration enforcement surges not as a Washington, DC, policy debate, but as a matter of state violence, accountability, and proportionality.

Polling from G. Elliott Morris showed that ICE’s approval rating collapsed from roughly +16 in early 2025 to around -14 by late 2025, and remains deeply negative entering 2026.

Over the past year, viral videos of masked ICE agents detaining legal residents and U.S. citizens, arresting people in public spaces, and allegations of abuse in detention centers have circulated widely.

YouGov/The Economist found a 20-point margin of voters who believed the Renee Good shooting was unjustified; Quinnipiac and CNN/SSRS report similar majorities rejecting ICE’s conduct.

Recent surveys show that only 20-30 percent of voters approve of how ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration agenda.

The administration bet that ICE’s highly aggressive, highly visible tactics would project strength. Instead, daily arrests by masked agents in high-profile raids in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago produced a dramatic backlash with the vast majority of American voters.

Having watched the Trump administration’s tactics for years, I’m sure they never expected this response, especially in small towns and rural communities.

One of the earliest protests happened last April in Tom Homan’s hometown of Sackets Harbor in upstate New York after ICE kidnapped three local students and their mother. Over 1,000 people showed up to demand their release.

In Brookings, South Dakota, activists convinced local law enforcement to avoid collaboration with ICE raids, much to the annoyance of Noem’s successor.

It’s clear now more than ever before that majorities disapprove of what they’re seeing, and a majority of Americans now say ICE enforcement makes communities less safe, not safer. Only about a third believe the agency is improving public safety.

Even Joe Rogan — who endorsed Trump in 2024 after a long, high-profile interview — publicly criticized ICE tactics on his podcast, comparing them to the “Gestapo.” He made the remarks during an episode featuring Senator Rand Paul’s reacttions to ICE’s mass deportation strategy.

Rogan also condemned the killing of Renee Good, calling it “very ugly” and “horrific” to watch. While Trump and DHS officials claimed the shooting was self-defense, Rogan pointed to videos and eyewitness accounts that disproved that narrative.

He isn’t alone. Other podcasters who helped Trump reach young, conservative-leaning voters in rural communities, like Andrew Schulz and Theo Von, have also criticized or distanced themselves from the administration’s immigration tactics.

After Alex Pretti’s murder, the intense blowback has spread even further — from sports figures to non-political subreddits to celebrities. This matters because these figures are not operating inside Democratic information ecosystems. They are responding to what they and their audiences can see.

Even major country artists like Zach Bryan have taken a stand with anti-ICE lyrics in his song “Bad News,” released earlier this month.

Bryan, a former Navy veteran and one of country music’s biggest stars, framed the song as a critique of national division, law enforcement abuses, and ICE raids. Trump officials, including Noem, attacked him for it.

But the opposition from American voters isn’t just limited to DHS and ICE. Support for Trump’s broader deportation agenda has also dropped sharply, with net approval falling nearly 30 points between spring and summer 2025.

The share of Americans who hold strongly unfavorable views of ICE doubled over the past year, from 19 percent to 40 percent. A January 2026 YouGov poll finds 51 percent of Americans say ICE uses too much force; only 10 percent want more.

Perhaps most telling: protesters against ICE are now more popular than the agency itself.

One data point would have been unthinkable even just a year ago: pluralities of Americans, registered voters, and independents now say ICE should be abolished.

Support for abolishing ICE surged from a 35-point deficit in January 2025 to just an 8-point gap today. As of January 2026, 42 percent of Americans support abolishing the agency — the highest level ever recorded — and opposition has narrowed to its smallest margin on record.

So what do those of us in small towns and rural communities do to win over voters who are starting to rethink their support for MAGA Republicans, especially as we head into the midterms?

We must connect the political violence from DHS to the affordability crisis we’re seeing across our communities.

David Shor tested a dozen public statements from a diverse set of Democratic elected officials on the murder of Renee Good. His experiments showed that a recent statement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez consistently performed best among voters.

“I want everybody to understand — the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for ICE to be doing this,” she said. “Understand how these dots connect. You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.”

In 2024, Trump ran on going after the “worst of the worst.” It’s a potent talking point, especially among rural audiences, but it was never their true intention. Despite claims of targeting violent criminals, data show the vast majority of those detained have no criminal record, while communities of color are disproportionately targeted through aggressive raids, racial profiling, and constitutionally dubious operations.

Those of us who studied policy deeply knew the true intent of Trump’s immigration policy was far broader. Their plans were spelled out in Project 2025, while Miller, one of its chief architects, vowed his mass deportation scheme would be “greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”

Miller is overseeing a highly orchestrated Project 2025 immigration campaign on behalf of the Trump administration. The Atlantic recently reported that Miller holds a daily meeting at the White House where he “demands progress reports on his mass-deportation campaign and issues orders to the full alphabet soup of federal enforcement agencies, including the FBI, CBP, ICE, HHS, and the DOD.”

The average American didn’t have the time, energy, or bandwidth to read through Project 2025 — and, during the 2024 campaign, as Parker Molloy documented, too many in the media bought into the lie that it wasn’t actually Trump’s agenda. It was. There were hundreds of pages, written in bureaucratic language and designed for insiders, not the public. Now, the American public is watching the plans in Project 2025 come to life; they don’t like what they’re seeing, and the shift isn’t confined to right-leaning podcasters.

Bovino’s firing proves that organizing still matters. It’s an important win for everyone who believes in the promise of America. But we also know that as long as Miller is operating out of the White House, the Trump administration intends to double down on the mass removal of immigrants and their families from the United States.

That’s why those of us at RuralOrganizing are committed to standing with our immigrant family members, neighbors, and friends. We know our fight is just beginning, and we draw hope from the fact that every day our movement grows stronger while the MAGA movement continues to crumble under its own weight.

One way you may be able to get involved is through our new initiative, the Rural Defenders Union, a cohort of rural leaders who will get training, meet other rural leaders from across the country, and receive a stipend for local organizing experiments. We’re looking for immigrants, family members of immigrants, friends, and allies to be part of the program.

To apply, fill out this form, and please share it with your allies and friends. We’re looking for people in rural places and small towns (less than 50,000), and we especially want to support people who might not be part of a formal organization but are looking to build with their community. The application should take about 30 min, so please join us!