How to Lose Immigration Voters in 10 Months

Trump voters are grappling with the reality of his immigration crackdown.

At a diner in Middletown, Ohio, “Seinfeld” is playing on the TV. Alex, a quality inspector at a nearby manufacturer who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, orders a Caesar salad wrap and lets out a sigh.

“I’m regretting my vote right now,” he says, buzzing his lips. He is concerned about welfare fraud in Minnesota, and he was concerned by chaos at the border during the Biden administration—especially because a friend of his had been sexually assaulted and left for dead by someone who had crossed the border illegally. But now he’s concerned about ICE overreach.

So is Dustin, who works at a paper packaging company in Lebanon, Ohio, and used to describe himself as pro-Trump: “Everything sounded good that Trump was saying.” But now Dustin says he’s been “getting on my religion here lately,” and that has been making him rethink things. He describes seeing videos of “ICE just pulling up on people, snatching people up… I just don’t think it’s right.”

For this story, I spoke with 12 Trump voters in Ohio—where I also live—and almost all of them held mixed views about immigration.

Half were men and half were women, ranging in age from 22 to 78, with the interviews lasting from 30 minutes up to nearly three hours. All held intricate views of the issue and recognized the tension and seeming contradictions that immigration enforcement entails.

Theresa, a forty-something year-old resident of South Lebanon, Ohio, is another example. She voted for Trump, finding herself becoming more conservative in recent years after being accused of a microaggression when she and a black coworker were discussing their haircare routines. The incident pained her because she tries her best to love everyone—“I will never be racist,” she told me. Theresa was especially emboldened in her politics after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, because she felt he was misunderstood by the Left in a similar way.

She still supports immigration enforcement generally, but admits that “we can all agree that the ICE thing… it looks bad.”

Recent polling suggests that 65% of Americans, like Alex, Dustin, and Theresa, think ICE has gone too far. Only 22% say that the agency’s actions are about right, and 12% think it has not gone far enough.

That’s not to say everyone is abandoning their support for Trump—or even for his aggressive enforcement tactics.

Emily, a neighbor of Theresa’s, is in the “not far enough” camp. She’s heard that Trump has a lower number of deportations than Barack Obama did, and the withdrawal of 700 ICE agents from Minnesota looks to her like a sign of Trump giving up. She doesn’t think that people should interfere with federal agents enforcing immigration law. But even in Emily’s case there is nuance—she describes herself as pro-deportation and pro-legal immigration.

Personal experience often colored people’s outlook, both for and against strong enforcement measures.

Emily’s dad worked in a Kentucky coal mine and then as carpet layer until his knees couldn’t take it anymore. Her mom worked at the school cafeteria and a mushroom plant which was known for the way it made the whole town smell, climbing narrow ladders in the dark and scooping mushrooms by the light of a miner’s helmet. After graduating high school, Emily too got a job at a factory. But in 2020, as an essential worker at a Cincinnati warehouse, she got COVID-19, which severely affected her heart; her health never recovered and her doctor told her that she’d need to quit.

She continued side work as a housecleaner and, needing flexible hours for doctor appointments, driving for DoorDash. At first she could make $100 a day dashing, just enough to cover her bills.

But over time she noticed there were more dashers, making it harder to get jobs and harder to make as much money. She also noticed that most of the new dashers didn’t speak English. Sometimes they’d mistakenly pick up the orders she was supposed to take, wasting time and costing her income as the minutes ticked by.

“It’s not that I don’t want people here,” she said. “That’s not what I’m saying. A lot of people take that wrong, and you’re labeled as racist, but I’m not. I’m Native American…. I don’t even look at skin color.”

Emily says she was raised better than that.

“People take [our views on immigration] the wrong way, like we’re racist and against people from other countries. That’s not even it,” she stressed. “What it is is that things are getting taken away that could be helping us. We have homeless people, we have veterans, elderly people, and it’s being taken away.”

Emily uses a food pantry to help make ends meet. There too, when she and her father visited a food giveaway in a neighboring town, she observed that most of the other people in line around her were not speaking English. When she went to the county Job and Family Services office to see if she would qualify for Medicaid, it seemed to her that she was the only native English speaker in the crowded waiting room.

Then there’s Adrian, a third-generation roofer in southwestern Ohio, who feels caught in the economic system. He sees illegal labor as “kind of modern-day slavery,” referring to how the work is subcontracted out to crews who are paid cash under the table.

“These legal [immigrants] use the illegals as a step up for themselves…. The illegals work for pennies on the dollar while the legals use them,” he said. “Work them long hours. Lots of them have to pay back the cartel to even be here, and also send money back home… And I’m a part of it. Pretty sad, man.”

He knows a guy who came to the U.S. by himself when he was 17. “Been here six years. Very good kid. Just looking for a better life.”

As did multiple people I talked with, Adrian described immigrants as hardworking, churchgoing people who “would give you the shirt off their back.” He knows immigrants who have been in the country for more than 20 years, who have families and are now afraid to send their children to school. Another man who used the same expression discussed at length the way immigrant fathers were often model providers.

“My biggest thing,” Adrian said, “would be having an easier way to citizenship.”

Adrian thinks that the government doesn’t really want to fix the immigration system. What he sees them focusing on is mostly performative. “If they really wanted to do anything about it, why wouldn’t they punish the people that are employing them?”

Erika, a sales rep for a small roofing company who warned me about her “very strong opinions” about immigration, makes too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to justify spending money on the high-deductible plans available from the Affordable Care Act marketplace

For Erika, the immigration issue is one one element of a more broadly broken system. She’s concerned about drug trafficking and how fraud robs veterans and the elderly, thinks that paying immigrants cash under the table is widespread in the construction industry in which she works, and is angered at the thought of people receiving benefits that they aren’t paying into. “There’s people in this country who have lived here their whole lives, their whole families, generations, who can barely get by,” she told me.

Shawna—a Trump voter who lives in Hamilton, Ohio with her husband and six kids—knows 12 people from her high school graduating class who have died from overdoses, plus eight more who are going through drug and alcohol counseling. Some, including one of her cousins, have left children behind.

She and her husband Kyle adopted the cousin’s orphaned son, forcing Shawna to go from full-time to part-time work in order to care for him. For a while the family got by on Kyle’s income as a construction worker. But in recent years he has been frequently cut from jobs despite receiving no specific complaints about his work.

A friend who stayed on one job after Kyle was cut told him the company had hired three immigrant workers that he believed were being paid under the table at the same total wage they’d been paying Kyle and his co-worker—three laborers for the price of two.

“I’m your husband and our kids’ dad. It’s my job to support us,” Kyle told Shawna, ashamed. When the couple went to apply for SNAP benefits, they told me they were the only English-speaking people in the waiting room. “I’m not saying these people don’t deserve the help, but if we weren’t bringing them in from other countries maybe we would be able to support ourselves,” Shawna said. “Why can’t we help America first?”

Yet Shawna, despite her America First sympathies and her husband’s work experiences, is also concerned about alleged racial bias in deportation and the number of people living in fear. After she outlined all the problems she sees with illegal immigration, I asked her about ICE tactics in Minnesota and she bluntly told me that she does not agree with them.

Her brother-in-law from Mexico is married to a U.S. citizen and they have two daughters, but he hasn’t been able to obtain legal status after 13 years of trying (in part because of run-ins with the law including a DUI). When Shawna’s 14-year-old daughter went to visit them in Texas, she witnessed ICE knocking on the door of the house across the street and then detaining the family inside. “When I heard that, I was like, ‘My child seen that, my 14-year-old child seen that,’” Shawna said. Her voice tapers.

“A deportation is one thing, but just frivolously—just shooting a gun because they’re not agreeing with you and… agents sitting outside of schools and taking these children and tearing families apart,” she added later. “No, I’m not okay with that.”

Shawna backed Trump in all three elections, but today says she would have been better off not voting.

It all raises a complex set of questions about the nature of democracy and the consequences of elections.

Isn’t it the job of elected officials to translate the values of their constituents—values that are often complicated and in tension—into policy that works? Leaders able to navigate these tensions prudently can hold their base without losing the ever-crucial middle.

On the one hand, the MAGA voters I spoke to want elected officials to uphold law and order. They want systems that honor the American notion of fairness—that you work hard for what you get and wait your turn without cutting in line. They want jobs in America that allow people to support themselves. On the other hand, they want a system that treats people humanely.

Theresa, for example, says that caravans of people she saw on television crossing the border were the defining visual of the Biden administration—but that she has empathy for people who need asylum, including her neighbors from Ukraine who live in the other half of the duplex she rents.

But some months she struggles to pay the rent and feels a prick of resentment about what she’s also heard on TV about generous aid given to immigrants in places like New York City. “I’m so torn,” she says, a phrase she repeats throughout the interview.

It echoes other phrases I heard: “I have a heart.” “I’m not cruel.” The occasional doubt—“am I racist? Am I a bad person?”

Which is something that perhaps I should have anticipated but did not.

My interviewees knew that to express concerns about immigration meant that they made themselves vulnerable to accusations of racism. “I don’t know if they really believe that, like we’re racist, or they hear their party say that, so they got that mindset,” Emily said of Democrats. “I’m not saying nobody is racist,” she adds. She grew up around it and knows better. “But 95% of us ain’t.”

Instead, Emily points again to her own struggles. Her vehicle broke down last week. Prices are rising for groceries, utilities, and rent. Employers treat people as replaceable. “We just want to be heard,” she says.

It’s a well-documented, if not always widely discussed, aspect of the national immigration question. New York Times editor David Leonhardt has pointed out that the costs of immigration are often disproportionately borne by the working class, while benefits accrue to the upper classes who use the cheaper services provided by immigrants but whose wages and neighborhoods remain more or less insulated from immigration’s effects.

In some of the interviews I sensed a hard, sometimes unnerving, defensiveness. While no one celebrated the deaths in Minnesota, the tone and emphasis tended toward defending ICE, defending borders, defending the right way to immigrate—and defending oneself against accusations of bigotry.

This—the assumption from anti-enforcement advocates that concerns about illegal immigration are automatically racist—strikes me as one of the roadblocks to a constructive public conversation about immigration. Another roadblock is an administration that seems bent on testing the limits of how far to go.

“The administration has some good ideas,” one young man told me. “It’s the execution that is lacking, because [Trump] likes to get involved in the mud and the pettiness.”

All of it raises another question: What do these MAGA voters want to see instead? What did they expect when casting their votes?

One pro-enforcement voter mused about whether it was possible to have “kind deportations.” It may sound like an oxymoron, but there are many areas of life in which we try to balance boundaries and flexibility; parenting talks I’ve been to uphold “firm kindness” as an ideal that honors both rules and individuality.

For Shawna and several others, speeding up the process would go a long way in making things more humane. She wants to keep families together, making sure people are well taken care of with food and have access to medical care, in environments more like hotels than prisons, with legal aid and the ability to notify and contact family members.

Other ideas I’ve heard include diverting resources being used to indefinitely support illegal immigrants here and instead using them to improve the vetting process at the border, making it easier for immigrants who are married to American citizens to become legal, and slowing down the hiring and onboarding of ICE agents to ensure better training and less tragedy.

Almost everyone I talked to agreed that securing the border is fundamental, and that the complicated issue of how to handle immigrants lacking legal status is downstream of an unregulated border. Most support limits to ensure we take care of Americans first, but even some who saw themselves as immigration hardliners were open to future increases in legal immigration if national health and capacity allow for it.

Deb, who opposes birthright citizenship and thinks that everyone here illegally should be deported, also thinks that legal immigration levels could be adjusted according to some metric of national thriving that would take into account, for example, veteran care, housing affordability, and public safety.

“There definitely needs to be a system…. [but] if we’re doing great, and we’ve got room, and our citizens aren’t on the streets and fighting this drug war, and our veterans are taken care of, then yeah, 100%,” she told me. “[Then I would support an increase of] legally vetted immigrants that have an appreciation for America and are willing to learn English, by all means.”

It’s a reminder that for a good number of people, this conversation isn’t even about immigration generally, but about illegal immigration specifically.

A lot of the passion for distinguishing between legal and illegal immigration boils down to the tenaciously held American value of fairness. “If you’re here illegally, you’re here illegally. That’s the bottom line, period,” Deb says. “And I’ve seen multiple interviews with legal immigrants who also have an issue with this.”

Listening to these qualitative descriptions of what voters would like to see—and reflecting on the centrality of the value of fairness—helps to make sense of apparent contradictions in polling data. For example, a June 2025 Gallup poll found that 77% of Republicans support deporting all illegal immigrants and also that 59% of Republicans support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. One can assume that the percentage supporting pathways to legal status for illegal immigrants would be even higher.

It’s a worldview that presumes that there is a legal pathway that any immigrant can follow. The mark of a fair system is a clear path: Start here and follow the steps. Fail to follow them and get deported—then get back in line to do it the right way.

Adrian, the roofer, used to think this way. But his proximity to people in the system has at least partially changed his mind. He thinks that what his fellow MAGA voters don’t understand is that many immigrants don’t actually have a way of coming to America legally. Moreover, he notes that there are gray-zone “illegal immigrants” who are actually here legally for the time being, such as those with pending asylum cases or temporary protected status.

“Just figure out a way to vet these people, and get the ones out that don’t belong here, and give the others a chance of trying to get what they need to do to be properly here,” he said.

Despite the flattening stereotypes we often deploy against one another in our partisan warfare, these interviews proved over and over again that ordinary voters are capable of the nuance that comes from lived experience in a complex and changing world. Many would ask that their leaders show themselves capable of the same.