53% of Americans say ICE should be abolished. GOP consultant says it's not about immigration

Tensions are rising across the country after a second Minnesota resident was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis this weekend. Witness video verified by NPR shows 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti holding a phone before he was tackled by multiple officers, pepper-sprayed and shot.

That is not what Trump administration officials have said about the shooting. They are defending the action as self defense, claiming Pretti was a domestic terrorist who was a threat to officers.

Now, Democrats in Washington say they will not vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security — including ICE — which could prompt another government shutdown.

U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) condemned the killing and the Trump administration’s characterization of it.

“I want to encourage people to believe what they see, don’t let anybody — don’t let this White House — tell you it is something else. He was no threat to anybody, he was helping a woman try to get up off the street after being shoved to the ground by an ICE agent. ... This is wrong, it’s outrageous. Please look at the video. Believe your own eyes,” he said.

Republican political consultant Mike Madrid says the American public is starting to sour on ICE in light of recent conduct.

Not so long ago, the desire to abolish ICE was seen as pretty fringe. Only left-wing protesters would be heard chanting the slogan during a march. But as ICE has continued to carry out an aggressive deportation campaign and has become increasingly militarized across the country, more and more Americans say ICE should be abolished.

Madrid is also co-host of the Latino Vote podcast, and, in a recent piece for his substack the Great Transformation, he documents the American public’s attitude shift against ICE. But he says it’s not about immigration.

The Show spoke with him more about it before the killing of Alex Pretti.

Full conversation

MIKE MADRID: The polling is showing that the American public broadly is moving against the whole idea of having ICE. The numbers aren't overwhelming, but they have moved in an overwhelming direction. About 39% of Americans publicly agreed with the idea that ICE should be abolished just a few short weeks ago, and now it's about 53%.

And so that kind of puts Democrats in a conundrum because while public sentiment is moving very rapidly against ICE, it's for the tactics and this overreach that is a big part of what it is that they're doing.

It's separate from the immigration question. There's clearly a lot of overlap, but I don't want to dismiss immigration as a turning point in the way that the Latino community specifically feels and Democrats and even some independents.

But by and large, this overreach by the federal government, by ICE, by the tactics that people are seeing on social media feeds and on news channels has really changed the sentiment about what the Trump administration is doing, separate and apart from mass deportations and immigration broadly.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So you said this began with LA and protests there and sort of the militarization of what happened there, and then sort of culminated in Minneapolis and this shooting of Renee Good. It sounds like it's pretty easy, what you've done here, to document the polling numbers as they've shifted as these events have occurred.

MADRID: Yeah, look, I tracked this very, very closely. We were seeing sentiment, you know, for Donald Trump actually erode quite quickly into his administration. But it began with the declaration of what he called Liberation Day, which was the announcement of tariffs.

And then the financial market started to rock. And that started to shake the confidence of people in his willingness or ability to reasonably handle the economy. And ever since then, he's been on this slow but steep decline. And this really catalyzed with a lot of voters. The economic question was what caused the erosion amongst Latino voters, which voted for them in historic numbers just a few months prior.

The militarization of the ICE raids and crackdowns in Los Angeles started to cement that sentiment. So again, I don't want to suggest that immigration isn't a question, especially when people are feeling terrorized in their community.

GILGER: Right

MADRID: And are being hunted down. But this is really much deeper and bigger than that. This is kind of emblematic of the entire administration's approach to sort of everything, whether it's incursions into Venezuela or threatening Greenland or alienating and angering Canada. It's this sort of chaotic method of trying to accomplish what he set out to do that is really rattling Americans' confidence in his ability to do the job.

GILGER: Americans still tell pollsters, regardless of what they think about ICE, like that they support immigration enforcement, even strict immigration enforcement, right?

Phil Desmangles

MADRID: Yeah, absolutely. And that hasn't changed. And again, for partisans, this is kind of shocking on both sides. Most Americans are really in the middle. They want strong, safe, secure borders. They want a reasonable path to immigration and immigration reform. They want it fixed.

GILGER: So I've already heard talk, Mike, that here in Arizona that this could be another kind of SB 1070 all over again, where Joe Arpaio's aggressive tactics resulted in a major backlash, but they were popular to begin with.

Like the idea of an immigration crackdown from the sheriff's department was popular and then was not when it happened. Will this come, you think, from the "Latino voter"? Like, that's a much more disparate voting block, as we've learned in recent years, right?

MADRID: Yeah, I mean, almost half of these voters nationally — and Arizona is probably very close — voted for Donald Trump. Arizona is a perfect example. You actually have these Trump-Gallego voters that voted for Donald Trump and Ruben Gallego.

So Latino voters have the weakest partisan anchor. They're the least racially polarized group in America, the fastest growing segment of the electorate. And again, the weakest partisan loyalties.

So they are very much voting in response to the political climate in which they're operating in. Joe Arpaio, this infamous person, clearly had a very hard line stance on immigration, galvanized a lot of Latino voters, especially activists who were engaged in the community.

But that wasn't what led to his downfall. His downfall was really that overreach, that overreach that we're seeing with the Trump administration, which is people are OK with cracking down in a humane, appropriate way with people that they feel should not be in this country legally.

Barack Obama, for example, famously deported far more undocumented Latinos than Donald Trump has at this point. But the way he did it was significantly, profoundly different.

And it's that overreach that ultimately led to bleeding amongst Republican voters who finally said we've had enough on a whole range of other issues that Joe Arpaio was dealing with. So it was not just the immigration question, although that was clearly a mobilizing factor.

GILGER: Yeah. So what do you think this could mean for the midterm elections we're looking forward to? What does it mean for the GOP and those who have been very tied to Trump?

MADRID: Well, there's a lot of things working against Donald Trump and the Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms. Those are demographics. The changing nature of the coalitions. Republicans are far more reliant on lower propensity, younger, non-college educated men.

That is the hardest demographic to get to show up. This is a demographic that Democrats had a tough time for 30 years trying to get to show up in midterm elections. And now Republicans are relying on them. And we'll see if they have any better luck with them. My strong sense is they will not.

The other thing is beyond demography, it's history. This is, the party that controls all levels of government historically does quite bad, quite poorly in the midterms. And history is the best guide of what the likeliest outcome is going to be in the future.

But the third and the most important is this: Even though this year, 2026, is sizing up to look a lot like the 2018 midterms, which were historically bad for Donald Trump and the Republicans, the economy was good in 2018.

Nobody is feeling like the economy is good right now. Two-thirds of the country feels that we're heading in the wrong direction economically. It's probably going to get worse before it gets better.

And so you add all three of those up, and that's a pretty strong cauldron of brew that suggests the Republicans are in deep, deep trouble.

GILGER: How does this ICE polling play into that, and this idea of government overreach?

MADRID: It certainly cements that sentiment. And like I said, it's not this one issue specifically that is at the top of voters' minds. Not even Latino voters, incidentally.

GILGER: Right.

MADRID: Polling is showing that Latinos by about 20 points, a wide margin, are saying it's the economy that's their priority. So that's where his main problem is. But the immigration stuff really cements and mobilizes voters against him that are predisposed to be against him.

But it also dampens support, especially amongst those Latino men who gave him a chance this time after voting Democrat for a couple of cycles to really take a step back and say, "Hey, the economy hasn't gotten better. In fact, it's worse. And look what this guy's doing to people in our community. Even if I don't want to vote for the Democrats, maybe I just don't vote at all."