A Survey Suggests Most Americans Are Not Keen on Trump’s Speech-Based Deportation Initiative
By trying to deport student activists he describes as antisemitic “terrorist sympathizers,” you might think, President Donald Trump is cannily choosing unpopular targets who are unlikely to attract much public support. But according to recent polling by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), most Americans are not fans of that speech-chilling initiative.
According to the latest iteration of FIRE’s quarterly National Speech Index survey, which was conducted from April 4 through April 11, just 26 percent of Americans “support” or “strongly support” a policy of “deporting foreigners legally in the United States on a student visa for expressing pro-Palestine views,” while 52 percent—twice as many— “oppose” or “strongly oppose” that policy. The rest were undecided.
When FIRE asked about “deporting foreigners legally in the United States with a green card for expressing pro-Palestine views,” the results were similar. While 23 percent of respondents thought that was a good idea, 53 percent disagreed, and 23 percent took no position.
“Deporting someone simply for disagreeing with the government’s foreign policy preferences strikes at the very freedoms the First Amendment was designed to protect,” says Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research adviser. “Americans are right to reject this kind of viewpoint-based punishment.”
The results might have been different, of course, if the targeted views had been described as “anti-Israel,” which would be a fair characterization of the campus protests inspired by the war that Hamas started on October 7, 2023. The respondents might have been even less inclined to reject “viewpoint-based punishment” if the survey had asked about foreigners with “pro-Hamas,” “pro-terrorist,” or “anti-Semitic” views, the more tendentious labels that Trump and his underlings prefer.
Still, assuming the respondents were familiar with this controversy and understood the range of opinions covered by the phrase “pro-Palestine views,” the results suggest that Americans are more skeptical of speech-based deportation than Trump probably expected. They might be even more worried if they recognized the startling breadth of the statutory authority on which Trump is relying to expel people whose views offend him, based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s unilateral determination that they pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests.
Americans also seem leery of Trump’s efforts to peremptorily deport suspected gang members, sometimes based on weakly supported allegations. Sixty-four percent of respondents said they opp
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