For years, calls from liberals to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement were political poison. Much like “defund the police,” the slogan polled terribly, weighed down by a widespread belief that ICE existed to identify and deport dangerous criminals.

Republicans leaned hard into that framing, warning that dismantling the agency would mean allowing violent offenders to roam free. Even as President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric toward “mass deportations,” most Americans continued to assume that enforcement would focus on serious crimes, not ordinary immigrants and certainly not U.S. citizens.

That assumption is collapsing.

A growing body of evidence suggests that Americans are no longer evaluating ICE as an abstract law-enforcement agency but instead as a visible, often brutal presence in everyday life. This hit an inflection point last Wednesday, when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, an unarmed 37-year-old mother. Her outrageous killing landed amid a deluge of viral videos and firsthand accounts of other ICE abuses, reshaping public opinion quickly and profoundly.

Those numbers reflect more than vague discontent. Majorities believe ICE routinely harms innocent people. Sixty percent say ICE at least sometimes arrests American citizens who have committed no crimes, and 51 percent believe the agency deports innocent citizens at least sometimes. While some respondents may not be parsing the legal distinction between citizens and noncitizens, the broader conclusion is unmistakable: Americans believe ICE is sweeping up people who do not deserve to be targeted at all.

Concerns about the agency’s conduct extend even further. Forty-two percent of Americans say ICE uses unnecessary force “often,” and another 18 percent say it does so “sometimes.” Nearly seven in 10 believe agents should be required to wear uniforms while making arrests, and a majority (55 percent) oppose officers hiding their identities behind masks. And when it comes to people killed by ICE agents or who died in the agency’s custody, 56% agree that those deaths “show that there is a fundamental problem with ICE that needs to be fixed.

ICE is now the least popular of nine federal agencies tested and the only one with net-negative favorability, according to a new YouGov survey that entered the field two days after Good’s killing. Just 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the agency, while 51 percent view it unfavorably. Intensity matters here: Only a quarter feels very favorable toward ICE, while 40 percent feel very unfavorably about it.

Overall, support for protests against the agency outweighs opposition, 49 percent to 41 percent.

Perhaps most striking is how far public opinion has moved toward accountability. By a lopsided margin, Americans say ICE needs stricter recruitment standards. Almost 60 percent support criminal prosecution for ICE agents who kill someone, and there is even modest support for shrinking the agency’s overall size. These are not fringe positions. They are mainstream judgments about an institution many Americans once barely thought about at all.

The one line that still has not been crossed, though, is abolition itself. YouGov finds the public’s opposition (45%) to eliminating ICE narrowly exceeds support (42%).

But even that resistance is eroding rapidly. Shortly before the 2024 presidential election, when Trump’s dehumanizing attacks on immigrants dominated the news, support for ICE peaked, with just 19 percent of registered voters favoring abolition and 66 percent opposed, according to data from Civiqs. As of this past Thursday—the newest data—42 percent support abolishing the agency and 50 percent oppose it, representing a seismic shift in public opinion.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos