United States President Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dropped to a record low amid growing backlash over two fatal shootings linked to his crackdown on migrants, a new survey shows.
In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Monday, just 39 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s handling of immigration, compared with 41 percent earlier this month.
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The poll, conducted between Friday and Sunday, comes amid an outcry over a US border agent’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, over the weekend.
Pretti was the second person to be killed by a federal agent in the city in less than a month, following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, on January 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.
Facing growing backlash, Trump said on Monday that he would send his border tsar, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis and struck a positive tone on his administration’s relations with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, following what he described as “a very good” telephone conversation between the two men.
In the new poll, 58 percent of respondents said US Immigration and Customs agents had gone “too far” in their crackdown on unauthorised migration, compared with 26 percent who said their actions were “about right” and 12 percent who said they did not go far enough.
The polling mirrors the findings of several opinion surveys carried out before Pretti’s killing.
In a poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena University and released on Friday, 61 percent of respondents said ICE’s tactics had gone too far, compared with 26 percent who said they were “about right” and 11 percent who believed they did not go far enough.
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A Wall Street Journal poll on January 16 found 58 percent of respondents said the Trump administration’s efforts to deport unauthorised migrants had gone too far, versus 46 percent who said they were about right or did not go far enough.
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