disapprove

Most California voters strongly disapprove of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and believe that raids in the state have unfairly targeted Latinos, according to a new poll.

The findings, released Sunday, reflected striking emotional reactions to immigration enforcement. When voters were asked to describe their feelings about news reports or videos of immigration raids, 64% chose rage or sadness “because what is happening is unfair.”

Among Democrats, 91% felt enraged or sad. Conversely, 65% of Republicans felt hopeful, “like justice is finally being served.”

Such divisions were consistent across 11 questions about the administration’s overall immigration strategy and specific aspects of the way enforcement is playing out in the state, with divisions along partisan lines. The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll was conducted for the Los Angeles Times.

Democrats almost unanimously oppose President Trump’s tactics on immigration, the poll showed. Most Republicans support the president, though they are not as united as Democrats in their approval.

“It was essential to show the strength of feelings because Democrats are strongly on the negative side of each of these policies,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll. “That struck me. I don’t usually see that kind of extreme fervor on a poll response.”

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The poll found that 69% of respondents disapprove of the way immigration enforcement is being carried out in the state.

Among Democrats, 95% disapprove, as well as 72% of voters with no party preference or others not affiliated with the two major parties, whereas 79% of Republicans approve.

The poll was completed online in English and Spanish from Aug. 11-17 by 4,950 registered voters in California.

A question that showed the least unified support among Republican voters asked respondents whether they agree or disagree that federal agents should be required to show clear identification when carrying out their work. The question comes as immigration agents have carried out raids using face coverings, unmarked cars and while wearing casual clothing.

Some 50% of Republicans agreed that agents should have to identify themselves, while 92% of Democrats agreed.

G. Cristina Mora, IGS co-director and a sociology professor at UC Berkeley who studies race and immigration, helped develop the poll questions. She said the poll shows that Republican voters are much more nuanced than Democrats. They also split on questions about due process, birthright citizenship and immigration enforcement in sensitive locations.

“Republicans are much more fractured in their thinking about immigration across the state,” Mora said.

Mora said she developed the question about agent identification in response to the recent bill led by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that would require immigration officers to display their agency and name or badge number during public-facing enforcement actions, similar to police and other local law enforcement.

Padilla also spearheaded a letter last month to Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons seeking information about the agency’s policies regarding the identification of agents while on duty. ICE has justified the tactics by stating that agents are at risk of doxxing and have faced increased assault on the job.

“The public has a right to know which officials are exercising police power, and anonymous enforcement undermines both constitutional norms and democratic oversight,” Padilla and 13 other Democrats wrote in the letter.

Another poll question that garnered mixed support of Republicans asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement, “ICE agents should expand immigration enforcement into schools, hospitals, parks and other public locations.”

Among Republicans, 53% agreed with that statement, though fewer than 1 in 3 agree strongly. Meanwhile, 94% of Democrats disagreed.

Shortly after Trump took office, his administration rescinded a 2011 memo that restricted immigration agents from making arrests in sensitive locations, such as churches, schools and hospitals. Since then, agents have been filmed entering locations that were previously considered off limits, putting immigrant communities on edge.

Schools in Los Angeles reopened this month with “safe zones” in heavily Latino neighborhoods and changed bus routes with less exposure to immigration agents. An 18-year-old high school senior, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, was walking his family’s dog in Van Nuys when he was taken into federal immigration custody.

Mora said the varied responses illustrate how California Republicans view the Trump administration’s immigration tactics with “degrees of acceptability.” They might feel strongly that immigrants with violent criminal histories should be deported, she said, but the takeover of MacArthur Park, when a convoy of immigration agents in armored vehicles descended there in a show of force, or the enforcement actions outside of public schools “might have been a step too far.”

Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant who wrote a book about how Latinos have transformed democracy, said the split among Republicans is consistent with national polling. The trend is problematic for Trump, he said, because it means he is losing big swaths of his base.

“This is becoming viewed as overreach more than it is immigration control,” he said. “The idea sets a frame for it, but the actual implementation is widely unpopular.”

Republicans were largely united in response to other questions. Asked about the Trump administration’s proposal to do away with birthright citizenship — which confers citizenship to all children born in the U.S. regardless of their parent’s legal status — 67% of GOP respondents approved, and most of them strongly approved. By contrast, 92% of Democrats disapproved, and as did seven in 10 respondents overall.

Mora said she was surprised by the fact that Latinos didn’t stand out as substantially more opposed to Trump’s actions than voters of other racial and ethnic groups. For example, 69% of Latino voters said ICE raids have unfairly targeted Latinos, just five percentage points higher than the 64% of white non-Latino voters who agreed.

“You would imagine Latinos would be through the roof here, but they’re not,” Mora said. She said this reminded her of research around the tendency for Latinos to individualize their experiences instead of seeing them as racially unjust.

Broadly, 72% of Latinos disagree with the way the Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws in California, while 25% approve and 3% have no strong opinion.

Among Latino voter subgroups, older men and third-generation (or beyond) women are the more likely to support the way immigration enforcement is being handled in California, with 38% of Latino men over age 40 in agreement compared to 11% of Latinas ages 18-39, although among both groups majorities disapprove.

Madrid said that’s consistent with national polling showing a decrease in support for Republicans among Latinos after record gains in the last presidential election. The question, he said, is whether Trump’s approval ratings among Latinos could regress substantially enough to flip control of Congress in the midterms.

“We’re not there yet,” he said.

Driverless Waymo vehicles, coated with graffiti and engulfed in flames. Masked protesters, dancing and cavorting around burning American flags. Anonymous figures brazenly blocking streets and shutting down major freeways, raining bottles and rocks on the police, while their compatriots waved Mexican flags.

The images flowing out of Los Angeles over nearly a week of protests against federal immigration raids have cast America’s second most populous city as a terrifying hellscape, where lawbreakers rule the streets and regular citizens should fear to leave their homes.

In the relentless fever loop of online and broadcast video, it does not matter that the vast majority of Los Angeles neighborhoods remain safe and secure. Digital images create their own reality and it’s one that President Trump and his supporters have used to condemn L.A. as a place that is “out of control” and on the brink of total collapse.

The images and their true meaning and context have become the subject of a furious debate in the media and among political partisans, centered on the true roots and victims of the protests, which erupted on Friday as the Trump administration moved aggressively to expand its arrests of undocumented immigrants.

As the president and his supporters in conservative media tell it, he is the defender of law and order and American values. They cast their opponents as dangerous foreign-born criminals and their feckless enablers in the Democratic Party and mainstream media.

The state’s political leaders and journalists offer a compelling rebuttal: that Trump touched off several days of protest and disruption with raids that went far beyond targeting criminals, as he previously promised, then escalated the conflict by taking the highly unusual step of sending the National Guard and Marines to Southern California.

Reaction to the raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the subsequent turmoil will divide Americans on what have become partisan lines that have become so predictable they are “calcified,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at UCLA.

“The parties want to build very different worlds, voters know it, and they know which world they want to live in,” said Vavreck, who has focused on the country’s extreme political polarization. “And because the parties are so evenly divided, and this issue is so personal to so many, the stakes are very high for people.”

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1. A demonstrator waves a Mexican flag as a fire that was set on San Pedro street burns on Monday night. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times) 2. Protesters continue to clash with the Los Angeles Police Department in downtown on Monday. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times) 3. Protesters continue to clash with the Los Angeles Police Department in downtown Los Angeles on Monday. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times) 4. Anti-ICE protesters face off with the LAPD on Temple St. on Monday. (Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times) 5. Flowers lay at the feet of federalized California National Guard members as they guard the Federal Building on Tuesday. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

As a curfew was imposed Tuesday, the sharpest street confrontations appeared to be fading and a national poll suggested Americans have mixed feelings about the events that have dominated the news.

The YouGov survey of 4,231 people found that 50% disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of deportations, compared with 39% who approve. Pluralities of those sampled also disagreed with Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to Southern California.

But 45% of those surveyed by YouGov said they disapprove of the protests that began after recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. Another 36% approved of the protests, with the rest unsure how they feel.

Faced with a middling public response to the ICE raids and subsequent protests, Trump continued to use extreme language to exaggerate the magnitude of the public safety threat and to take credit for the reduction in hostilities as the week progressed.

In a post on his TruthSocial site, he suggested that, without his military intervention, “Los Angeles would be burning just like it was burning a number of months ago, with all the houses that were lost. Los Angeles right now would be on fire.”

A large crowd hold their fist up with faith leaders outside the Federal building in downtown Los Angeles as demonstrators protest immigration raids in L.A. on Tuesday,.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

In reality, agitators set multiple spot fires in a few neighborhoods, including downtown Los Angeles and Paramount, but the blazes in recent days were tiny and quickly controlled, in contrast to the massive wildfires that devastated broad swaths of Southern California in January.

Trump’s hyperbole continued in a fundraising appeal to his supporters Tuesday. In it, he again praised his decision to deploy the National Guard (without the approval of California Gov. Gavin Newsom), concluding: “If we had not done so, Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”

The Republican had assistance in fueling the sense of unease.

His colleagues in Congress introduced a resolution to formally condemn the riots. “Congress steps in amid ‘out-of-control’ Los Angeles riots as Democrats resist federal help,” Fox News reported on the resolution, being led by Rep. Young Kim of Orange County.

A journalist based in New Delhi pronounced, based on unspecified evidence, that Los Angeles “is descending into a full-blown warzone.”

Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas Collins suggested that the harm from the protesters was spreading; announcing in a social media post that a care center for vets in downtown L.A. had been temporarily closed.

“To the violent mobs in Los Angeles rioting in support of illegal immigrants and against the rule of law,” his post on X said, “your actions are interfering with Veterans’ health care.”

A chyron running with a Fox News commentary suggested “Democrats have lost their mind,” as proved by their attempts to downplay the anti-ICE riots.

Many Angelenos mocked the claims of a widespread public safety crisis. One person on X posted a picture of a dog out for a walk along a neatly kept sidewalk in a serene neighborhood, with the caption: “Los Angeles just an absolute warzone, as you can see.”

Federal officers and the National Guard protect the Federal building in downtown Los Angeles as demonstrators protest on Tuesday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

In stark contrast to the photos of Waymo vehicles burning and police cars being pelted with rocks, a video on social media showed a group of protestors line dancing. “Oh my God! They must be stopped before their peaceful and joy filled dance party spreads to a city near you!” the caption read. “Please send in the Marines before they start doing the Cha Cha and the Macarena!”

And many people noted on social media that Sunday’s Pride parade in Hollywood for the LGBTQ+ community went off without incident, as reinforced by multiple videos of dancers and marchers celebrating along a sun-splashed parade route.

But other activists and Democrats signaled that they understand how Trump’s position can be strengthened if it appears they are condoning the more extreme episodes that emerged along with the protests — police being pelted with bottles, businesses being looted and buildings being defaced with graffiti.

On Tuesday, an X post by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass reiterated her earlier admonitions: “Let me be clear: ANYONE who vandalized Downtown or looted stores does not care about our immigrant communities,” the mayor wrote. “You will be held accountable.”

The activist group Occupy Democrats posted a message online urging protesters to show their disdain for the violence and property damage.

“The moment violence of property damage begins, EVERY OTHER PROTESTER must immediately sit on the floor or the ground in silence, with signs down,” the advisory suggested. “The media needs to film this. This will reveal paid fake thugs posing as protesters becoming violent. ….The rest of us will demonstrate our non-violent innocence and retain our Constitutional right to peaceful protest.”

Craig Silverman, a journalist and cofounder of Indicator, a site that investigates deception on digital platforms, said that reporting on the context and true scope of the protests would have a hard time competing with the visceral images broadcast into Americans’ homes.

“It’s inevitable that the most extreme and compelling imagery will win the battle for attention on social media and on TV,” Silverman said via email. “It’s particularly challenging to deliver context and facts when social platforms incentivize the most shocking videos and claims, federal and state authorities offer contradictory messages about what’s happening.”

Dan Schnur, who teaches political science at USC and UC Berkeley, agreed. “The overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful,” Schnur said, “but they don’t do stories on all the planes that land safely at LAX, either.”

Protesters march in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Though it might be too early to assess the ultimate impact of the L.A. unrest, Schnur suggested that all of the most prominent politicians in the drama might have accomplished their messaging goals: Trump motivated his base and diverted attention from his nasty feud with his former top advisor, Elon Musk, and the lack of progress on peace talks with Russia and Ukraine. Newsom “effectively unified the state and elevated his national profile” by taking on Trump. And Bass, under tough scrutiny for her handling of the city’s wildfire disaster, has also gotten a chance to use Trump as a foil.

What was not disputed was that Trump’s rapid deployment of the National Guard, without the approval of Newsom, had little precedent. And sending the Marines to L.A. was an even more extreme approach, with experts saying challenges to the deployment would test the limits of Trump’s power.

The federal Insurrection Act allows the deployment of the military for law enforcement purposes, but only under certain conditions, such as a national emergency.

California leaders say Trump acted before a true emergency developed, thereby preempting standard protocols, including the institution of curfews and the mobilization of other local police departments in a true emergency.

Even real estate developer Rick Caruso, Bass’ opponent in the last election, suggested Trump acted too hastily.

“There is no emergency, widespread threat, or out of control violence in Los Angeles,” Caruso wrote on X Sunday. “And absolutely no danger that justifies deployment of the National Guard, military, or other federal force to the streets of this or any other Southern California City.”

“We must call for calm in the streets,” Caruso added, “and deployment of the National Guard may prompt just the opposite.”