{"id":517641,"date":"2026-01-15T09:55:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T09:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/517641\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T09:55:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T09:55:14","slug":"65-say-deportation-crackdown-gone-too-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/517641\/","title":{"rendered":"65% say deportation crackdown ‘gone too far’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sixty-five percent of Chicagoans think the Trump administration\u2019s recent federal immigration enforcement activities<\/a> have \u201cgone too far,\u201d according to results from a survey commissioned by the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and conducted by NORC as part of the University of Chicago\u2019s ChicagoSpeaks panel.<\/p>\n

But Chicagoans were sharply divided on enforcement<\/a> \u2014 and the city\u2019s sanctuary status \u2014 by race, income and age.<\/p>\n

The strongest opposition to federal enforcement and support for the city\u2019s sanctuary policy was among people who were white, wealthier and living on the city\u2019s North Side, the survey found.<\/p>\n

The survey of 1,230 Chicagoans, provided exclusively to the Tribune by the Mansueto Institute, was conducted between Nov. 24 and Dec. 8, just after federal deportation efforts in the Chicago region, called Operation Midway Blitz<\/a>, concluded. The poll\u2019s margin of error was 3.9%.<\/p>\n

Asked to complete the sentence \u201cwhen it comes to deporting individuals who are in the country without legal documentation, would you say recent federal immigration enforcement activities in Chicago have \u2026\u201d 64.9% responded \u201cgone too far,\u201d 12.8% responded \u201cbeen about right,\u201d 8.4% said had \u201cnot gone far enough,\u201d and a little less than 14% said they were unsure.<\/p>\n

The figures are slightly higher than a national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in mid-October. That poll found 53% of respondents said President Donald Trump\u2019s administration was doing \u201ctoo much\u201d when it comes to deporting immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally, and 36% said it was \u201cabout the right amount.\u201d<\/p>\n

A recent national CNN poll conducted by SSRS<\/a> reported that 51% of respondents thought ICE enforcement actions were making cities less safe, whereas 31% thought those actions were making cities safer. That poll also reported that more people thought Trump\u2019s deportation efforts had gone too far, up from 45% last February to 52% now.<\/p>\n

At the same time the Chicago survey kicked off, a federal judge had issued a scathing opinion<\/a> criticizing immigration agents\u2019 use-of-force tactics against arrestees, protesters and bystanders during Midway Blitz \u2014 from pointing guns to releasing tear gas and flash-bang grenades \u2014 and accused Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino and agents of lying about Chicagoans\u2019 actions.<\/p>\n

In the poll, 74.3% of people living in the north-central part of the city said they thought recent immigration enforcement activities had gone too far, while 79.3% of people with incomes above $100,000 reported the same. The feds conducted raids in Lakeview and Lincoln Park in late October, deploying tear gas on a residential street. Meanwhile, only 53.4% of respondents who reported earning $30,000 or less annually \u2014 a segment of society the Trump administration has long argued has seen their job prospects hurt by immigration \u2014 said they believed the Trump administration had gone too far in immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n

For people over the age of 75, a generation that grew up in the wake of World War II and during the Civil Rights movement, 76.4% similarly believed enforcement went \u201ctoo far.\u201d That was the highest opposition among any age group over 18.<\/p>\n

The topline results were unsurprising to Chris Berry, the faculty director at Mansueto, who also teaches at the University of Chicago\u2019s Harris School of Public Policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know Chicago is a liberal city and Midway Blitz didn\u2019t make a positive impression on Chicagoans for many reasons,\u201d he said. But the gaps between white, Black and Hispanic respondents were \u201cmassive,\u201d Berry said.<\/p>\n

There was a 20-point gap between white and Black respondents who thought enforcement had \u201cgone too far\u201d \u2014 75.5% versus 55.6%. For Hispanic respondents, that figure was 62.5%.<\/p>\n

Asked how strongly they supported the city\u2019s ordinance \u201cthat limits city agencies and employees from cooperating with federal civil immigration enforcement,\u201d 75.5% of white respondents said they strongly or somewhat supported it, while 44.7% of Black and 52.1% of Hispanic respondents said the same.<\/p>\n

Black and Hispanic respondents were also more ambivalent about the city\u2019s ordinance barring cooperation with federal immigration enforcement actions. A total of 40.5% of Black respondents and 33.7% of Hispanic respondents reported being unsure whether they supported the sanctuary policy, or that they neither supported nor opposed it.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s deployment of ICE and border patrol to Chicago as part of his sweeping program to remove immigrants from the U.S. comes a year after Mayor Brandon Johnson declared an end to a migrant crisis that saw Texas\u2019 Republican governor send busloads of largely Venezuelan migrants to Chicago and other major cities run by Democratic leaders.<\/p>\n

The migrant crisis was one of the more racially divisive in recent Chicago history. Several members of the City Council\u2019s Black Caucus, echoing constituents, resented the resources and attention\u00a0<\/a>devoted<\/a> to the crisis that had not been\u00a0marshaled for their neighborhoods in recent years. Similar intra-racial tensions also arose between new arrivals and longtime immigrants about the disparity in government support they received.<\/p>\n

The survey also asked how satisfied respondents were with the local response. Across the board, a majority were either satisfied or strongly satisfied with the city, state and Chicago Public Schools\u2019 response to the federal campaign. A greater share of respondents \u2014 24% \u2014 had no opinion about CPS\u2019 response.<\/p>\n

Dissatisfaction with the local response ranged from approximately 30% to 35%. Berry acknowledged that it could encompass both progressive frustrations that either the city or state was not doing enough to resist ICE, including by allowing local law enforcement to respond to protests.<\/p>\n

Despite overall satisfaction with the city\u2019s response to Midway Blitz and support for its sanctuary status, Johnson\u2019s approval numbers have not budged much compared with the two previous quarters of the survey. Johnson\u2019s approval remains at about 25%, Berry said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sixty-five percent of Chicagoans think the Trump administration\u2019s recent federal immigration enforcement activities have \u201cgone too far,\u201d according…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":517642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818,230801,230802,121074,4154,9108],"class_list":{"0":"post-517641","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois","11":"tag-manseuto-institute","12":"tag-norc","13":"tag-operation-midway-blitz","14":"tag-poll","15":"tag-survey"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115898517070795318","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}