A significant majority of registered voters, including a majority of Hispanics, support a national program to deport illegal aliens from the United States, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll.
A majority of 53 percent of Hispanics support the deportation of illegal aliens en masse, while 47 percent are against it.
Majorities of Republicans (88 percent) and independents (60 percent) support a widescale deportation effort, as does a substantial minority of Democrats (38 percent).
Notably, former President Donald Trump, who has a one-point edge over Biden nationally in this poll, has been a staunch advocate for a widescale deportation operation. Last September, he vowed to execute “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if elected. Speaking in Phoenix on Thursday, Trump stated he wants “deportation” while “Biden wants an invasion.”
The poll revealed that if a national deportation program were implemented, most respondents would support local law enforcement being empowered to identify illegal aliens in their communities. Of those surveyed, 62 percent said they would back “local police and law enforcement trying to identify which people were U.S. citizens, and which were undocumented immigrants.” Nearly four in ten voters would oppose this.
Most independents (57 percent) and Republicans (84 percent) would favor police working to identify illegal immigrants if there were a national deportation operation. A majority of 57 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Democrats (45 percent) also support this.
Voters are divided on “establishing large detention centers, where people would be sent and held, while the government determined whether or not they should be deported.” A majority of 52 percent oppose large detention centers, while 48 percent support them.
Hispanics are evenly split on the issue of detention centers, while a majority of independents, 56 percent, are against them.
The poll, conducted from June 5-7, sampled 1,615 registered voters and has a margin of error of ± 3.8 percentage points. The samples for the questions relevant to this article ranged from 1,345 to 1,346 registered voter respondents.
