Former President Donald Trump has pledged to conduct the largest deportation in U.S. history if elected for a second term. During his presidential campaign, he anticipated he would invoke wartime means to achieve this, proposing the use of military-guarded encampments to round up and deport undocumented immigrants – an idea almost half of Americans and most conservatives support, according to a new survey.
The 2024 American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 50% of Americans opposed the idea of setting encampments, while 47% favored it.
When analyzing demographics, Axios found that 79% of Republicans favored putting undocumented immigrants in encampments, compared with 47% of independents and 22% of Democrats.
Support for undocumented immigrant encampments increased among Americans who trust far-right news, with 91% of them supporting the idea, followed by 82% of Fox News viewers and 44% of Americans who do not watch TV news, the survey shows.
PRRI also analyzed support for Trump's proposed policy by religion and race. Around 75% of white evangelical Protestants favored militarized encampments for undocumented immigrants, followed by 61% of white Catholics.
Support for the policy decreased among non-white Christian groups. About 47% of Hispanic Protestants supported encampments, followed by 42% of Black Protestants and 33% of Hispanic Catholics. Unaffiliated Americans showed the least support for the policy, with only 32% favoring militarized encampments.
"This is not just rhetoric here. I do think it's one of the more disturbing things that we found," Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, told Axios.
Among other findings, the survey showed that an increasing number of Americans support stricter immigration policies. Concretely, 52% of respondents said they favor allowing immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children to gain legal resident status—a 10-point decrease since PRRI first asked the question in 2018.
Trump's presidential campaign is using the growing anti-immigrant sentiment to its advantage, spreading controversial and mostly false claims about immigrants. Most recently, Trump accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets and said immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the country.
Despite the rhetoric, a recent The New York Times/Siena College poll revealed that most Hispanics in the country don't think the inflammatory statements are directed at them. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they believed Trump was not referring to people like them when he spoke about immigrants, while 50% of foreign-born Latino voters expressed feeling the same way.
The 1798 law Trump has proposed using to create militarized encampments was last invoked during World War II. The language of the law refers to immigrants as the "enemy from within" and attacks their genes.
The law, which formed part of the Alien and Sedition Acts established during the presidency of John Adams, reads:
"Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies."
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