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Has Immigration Become Trump's Achilles Heel?

Dan Pfeiffer

Jul 22

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For the last couple of weeks, the political world has been rightly (and enjoyably) focused on the furor over Donald Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files. While the story might seem like a distraction from the daily horrors of Trump 2.0, the fact that the President of the United States is refusing to release records related to a convicted sex trafficker with whom he used to party is a very big deal.

But amid the Epstein chaos, some recent and important poll results haven’t received the attention they deserve.

For nearly a decade, immigration has been central to Trump’s political rise. In 2016, he intuited that a significant segment of the electorate was anxious about immigration. His signature proposal to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it was a dumb idea—but it sent a powerful signal about how aggressively he’d approach the issue. In 2024, Trump again weaponized chaos at the border into a potent wedge. According to the exit polls, he had a 9-point edge on the question of which candidate voters trusted more on immigration, and he won voters who said immigration was their top issue by 80 points.

Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown at the outset of his second term initially put Democrats on the defensive and helped boost his approval ratings.

But a wave of new polling shows that immigration is no longer a political strength for Trump. In fact, it may now be his Achilles’ heel—one with serious implications for 2026, 2028, and the future of immigration reform.

Trump’s Approval Ratings on Immigration Are Tanking

Trump’s overall approval rating has been steadily sinking in recent months. His numbers on the economy and inflation are slipping. But the most dramatic drop is on immigration.

According to Nate Silver’s approval tracker, Trump had a net +11.1 rating on immigration as of March 7th. As of this Monday, he's 6.7 points underwater on the issue—a nearly 18-point swing in just a few months...