Republicans are following President Trump’s lead and largely standing by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite calls from some Democratic politicians for the Department of Homeland Security agency to be abolished.
Seventy-two percent of GOP-affiliated adults in the U.S. have a positive view of ICE, whereas the same percentage of Democrats have a negative perception of the embattled agency, according to a July 11-15 Pew Research poll released Tuesday.
Collectively, 44 percent of all adults approve of the immigration enforcement agency. A slightly larger share – 47 percent – do not approve of ICE.
Conservatives have also grown less supportive of the FBI after Trump’s most recent attacks on the Justice Department component for its continued investigation into his 2016 campaign. Forty-nine percent of Republicans now approve of the FBI, compared to 44 percent who disapprove.
[Trump: Democrats who want to abolish ICE are ‘disciples of a very low IQ person, Maxine Waters’]
That number has dropped 16 percentage points since early 2017, prior to the revelation that FBI personnel who had been investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia were strong opponents of Trump.
Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats view the FBI favorably.
Overall, nearly two-thirds of all adults (65 percent) are content with the FBI, and only around one quarter are not.
The telephone survey was conducted among 1,007 adults and had a 3.7 percentage point margin of error for the entire group. Questions among Republicans had a 5.5 percentage point margin of error and those of Democrats had a 5.7 percentage point margin.
