Why GOP voters still love ICE

The Trump administration’s thuggery continues to grow and expand. In the aftermath of Alex Jeffrey Pretti’s killing on Saturday in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents, hundreds of people almost immediately began to protest at the site where he was held down and shot at least 10 times. Federal law enforcement agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection rained flash bangs and tear gas down on the crowd. They grabbed protesters and beat them. Witnesses described the scene as dystopian, and they had trouble believing that American citizens engaged in peaceful protest would be treated this way by their own government.

In the middle of the mayhem, an elderly man stood his ground. “They f**king killed him!,” he screamed. “I’m 70 years old, and I’m f**king angry!”

This man was channeling the pain and anger of America — and the world.

Immigration has long been one of Donald Trump’s most popular issues. A new poll conducted by POLITICO shows that 49% of Americans support Trump’s mass deportation campaign. According to the results of a nationwide New York Times/Siena poll, his support continues to collapse, with only 41% approving of his performance as president. 

But while tens of millions of Americans are outraged by the growing cruelty of the Trump administration, including his mass deportation campaign, many tens of millions of others are cheering it on. Ninety percent of Republicans expressed support in a recent CBS/YouGov poll. The breakdown on racial lines is stark: A majority of white Americans support the president’s immigration policies, while a majority of non-whites oppose them.

Ten years ago, in the heat of his first presidential campaign, Trump bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He was right.

But a new report by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals something even more troubling about Trump’s MAGA base and the extremes to which they will go to support his mass deportation campaign and larger project to Make America White Again and creating what would be a de facto police state in America.

For example, a majority of Americans (61%) agree that “immigrants, regardless of legal status, should have basic rights and protections such as the ability to challenge their deportation before a judge in court.” But only 37% of Republicans agree with this basic principle of American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. 

A majority of Republicans also support arresting and detaining immigrants who do not have a criminal record. Most Americans and the vast majority of Democrats (88%) oppose such a policy. 

Republicans, by a large majority (69%), also support putting “illegal immigrants” in internment camps until they can be removed from the country. 

Predictably, a majority of Republicans also want “illegal aliens” to be sent to foreign prisons, or gulags, in such countries as El Salvador, Rwanda and Libya without due process. A majority of Americans (68%) and an overwhelming majority of Democrats (90%) oppose such inhumane policies.

Ultimately, for Trump’s MAGA followers and the larger anti-democracy right-wing, the man screaming at the site of Alex Pretti’s killing is music to their ears. They see dystopia as a utopia. This warped vision of unlimited power, the silencing of critics and ability to impose their beliefs on those deemed to be the Other serves their goal of ending the country’s pluralistic democracy and replacing it with a White Christofascist plutocracy ruled by a very small number of powerful White men. This new America would be a union of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Jim and Jane Crow, and technofeudalism. Rank-and-file MAGA followers and other members of the right-wing will not live better material lives in this world, but they will enjoy the psychological wages of being told they are inherently superior over the Other as their need for social dominance is validated. 

This moral inversion further reveals a society in the grips of fascism, authoritarianism and the culture of cruelty. But the GOP is experiencing little if any cognitive dissonance between their expressed family values and Christian morality and their support for the cruel, antisocial policies of the Trump administration — and the great harm they are causing huge swaths of the public. For them, power, domination and control are what ultimately matter. 

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To combat this, Democrats and other Americans of conscience need to speak in much clearer language that connects fundamental questions of right and wrong, the good society, human freedom and happiness to the country’s current democracy crisis. In the Age of Trump, the pro-democracy movement is fundamentally a site for moral struggle and contestation, and it needs to draw upon the spirit and teachings of the Civil Rights Movement and other great people’s movements if it is to prove successful.

There is more danger ahead. On Saturday, Trump accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of “inciting insurrection” to distract from widespread “fraud” in that state. The president has also repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act as part of his mass deportation campaign. Many suspect that such a move could serve as pretext to order the military to occupy Democratic-led cities as part of a plan to ultimately nullify the results of the 2026 midterms.

There will be many more Alex Prettis, Renee Goods and other people whose names are not yet known in the months and years ahead as the machinery of Trump’s mass deportation campaign gets up to full speed. But Pretti’s killing, as Walz said in a press conference on Sunday is an inflection point, a reckoning.

“To Americans who are watching this right now, and I don’t know, maybe you’re watching it with curiosity, bewilderment, horror, scorn or sympathy,” he said. “I’ve got a question for all of you: What side do you wanna be on? The side of an all-powerful federal government that can kill, injure, menace, and kidnap its citizens off the streets? On the side of a nurse at the VA hospital who died bearing witness to such a government? Or the side of a mother whose last words were, ‘I’m not mad at you.’”

The American people are divided, living in the same country but not the same reality. Tens of millions will answer Walz’s question in ways that may rock and break Americans of conscience — especially mainstream liberals and centrists.

Democrats and other pro-democracy voices cannot assume that the increasingly not-so-silent majority who oppose Trump’s policies on immigration will give them a victory in the upcoming midterm elections. There remains a deep base of support for Trump’s policies — and their cruelty. The Democratic Party needs to stake out a firm, unequivocal moral position and then lead from there. One of the first steps toward this will be for Senate Democrats to vote against funding for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security — or at least imposing severe limits and strict oversight — and explaining in clear direct language how this will be a vote about the country’s character and the type of people we Americans want to be.

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