What do Americans really think about immigration policy?

Last week, an Associated Press-NORC poll backed up findings from other survey outlets in recent months: Americans disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling immigration. The exact numbers vary—with roughly 53% to 65% of respondents saying they think Trump has been too aggressive on immigration—but the polls all indicate that Trump’s immigration policies don’t have the approval of a majority of the American people.

While the polling has prompted speculations that Republicans will take a beating in the midterm elections this November, Americans’ actual thoughts on immigration are more complex. Many are critical of how Trump has handled immigration, but most respondents across multiple polls still express support for the president’s stated goal of removing all illegal immigrants from the United States. Even more Americans support removing dangerous illegal immigrants from the country. And while many news outlets have depicted immigration policies as an albatross around Republicans’ necks as they head into the midterms, the polling on that question also isn’t quite so clear.

Do Americans support widespread deportations? The Immigration Accountability Project in March released a poll showing that roughly 66% of likely voters want illegal immigrants to be deported. That’s a stated goal for the Trump administration, according to numerous public pronouncements by Trump’s campaign, the White House, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. About 80% of Americans told the project that they believed the United States had a responsibility to enforce its immigration laws.

Roughly 72% of respondents to the poll also said they supported penalizing businesses that hire illegal immigrants in violation of federal law, with 77% saying they supported escalating penalties for businesses that repeatedly hire illegal immigrants. Solid majorities of respondents added that they supported allowing the federal government to conduct worksite enforcement checks at businesses that hire illegal immigrants and requiring employers to verify the citizenship status of their employees.

In a similar survey, the private polling group Cygnal found that roughly 61% of U.S. voters want illegal immigrants deported. Only Democratic voters largely expressed opposition to that idea, while most Republicans and a majority of independents expressed support for it.

So are deportation supporters simply Trump loyalists? Support for deportations doesn’t necessarily equate to support for the Trump administration’s immigration policies. And opposing his methods doesn’t necessarily equate to opposing deportation, either. In September, a New York Times/Siena University poll found that roughly 52% of respondents disapproved, either somewhat or strongly, of Trump’s immigration policies. But in the same poll, roughly 54% of respondents also said they either somewhat or strongly supported the idea of deporting illegal immigrants living in the United States.

In January, a Harvard/Harris poll showed that slightly more than half of Americans (52%) supported deporting all illegal immigrants, but that less than half (46%) approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Additionally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll from February showed that most Americans (61%) wanted illegal immigrants deported, but a similar majority (60%) didn’t approve of Trump’s immigration policies.

Why the discrepancy? It likely arises from the negative press that Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts have received over the past year. Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, told WORLD that when his organization crafted its poll, it tried to strip the questions down so that they only asked about the act of immigration enforcement and didn’t invite respondents to address the news surrounding the Trump administration’s efforts.

“The public has soured a little bit on Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Chmielenski said. “You throw in Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a question, and you’re going to automatically taint an individual’s response.”

He explained that his team worked to avoid affecting people’s answers by asking different questions.

“We simply asked, ‘Do you think that people who cross the border illegally should be deported from the United States?’ ‘Yeah!’ You saw over 60% of them said, ‘Yes,’” Chmielenski said. “I would be willing to bet that if another pollster had asked, ‘Do you think ICE should be removing people?’ Well, boom, ICE sets them in a bad mood based on their current opinion of ICE, and yeah, it might hurt that.”

Does that mean Americans support Trump’s goals, just not his methods? A Politico poll from earlier this month found that 23% of respondents said they supported the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement goals while harboring concerns about his methods. Another 22% said they supported both Trump’s methods and his goals. Meanwhile, 18% said they didn’t know what they thought about his goals and methods. Roughly 51% of all respondents said they thought he’d been too aggressive in his efforts to conduct immigration enforcement operations.

The National Immigration Forum published research in February that found roughly 3 out of 5 Americans have different priorities than Trump does on immigration. While the Trump administration has supported deporting all illegal immigrants, 68% of respondents told the forum that they want the government to focus on deporting only illegal immigrants who are a threat to public safety.

“They feel that the enforcement has been too severe, that the president has crossed lines,” said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum. “Three in 5 Republicans, specifically, said that they want enforcement only to focus on threats to public safety and national security.”

Other polls show wide support for that idea. The January Harvard/Harris poll found that 73% of Americans supported deporting illegal immigrants who’d committed crimes in the United States—at least 20 percentage points higher than those who supported deporting all illegal immigrants.

What does all of this mean for the midterms? The general dissatisfaction with Trump’s immigration policies doesn’t appear to have pushed many voters toward Democratic candidates. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found that roughly 52% of all respondents said they were less likely to support a candidate who supported Trump’s deportation approach. And 57% of respondents who identified as independent said they were less likely to support a candidate who approved of Trump’s immigration policies.

But Cygnal’s polling from earlier this year suggested that candidates’ positions on ICE may have little to no effect on November’s midterms. Roughly 46% of likely voters said they would choose someone who opposed deporting illegal immigrants over someone who would support it in the next midterm election, while roughly 46% said the opposite. About 8% told Cygnal they were undecided.

The Immigration Accountability Project’s poll found that if the midterm election were held on the day the poll was conducted, nearly 47% of respondents would have voted Democrat, just over 43% would have voted Republican, and about 10% weren’t sure how they’d vote. But 72% said that, when the midterm elections rolled around, the government’s handling of illegal immigration would play a significant role in how they voted.

Politico’s poll showed that roughly 41% of all respondents said they would prefer that the representative chosen to represent them in the midterm elections would support Trump’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants. But about half of those want Congress to put guardrails in place. Roughly 37% said they would prefer their representative to oppose and significantly curtail Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts.

Still, about 21% told Politico they didn’t know what stance they would prefer their representative to take.