NBC Poll Finds Declining Support For Trump's Immigration Agenda -- Blame NBC

Larry Elder
Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:25:21 -0800
Opinion

NBC News says public support for President Donald Trump's immigration agenda is collapsing. Maybe NBC should look in the mirror.

A new NBC Decision Desk poll reports that 49% of adults now "strongly disapprove" of Trump's immigration policy, up from 34% in April. Polls deserve scrutiny — including sample design and question wording — but assume NBC is correct. The obvious question is, what changed?

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the answer is simple: The media environment changed — and NBC helped change it.
Updated: Thu Feb 19, 2026

NBC News says public support for President Donald Trump's immigration agenda is collapsing. Maybe NBC should look in the mirror.

A new NBC Decision Desk poll reports that 49% of adults now "strongly disapprove" of Trump's immigration policy, up from 34% in April. Polls deserve scrutiny — including sample design and question wording — but assume NBC is correct. The obvious question is, what changed?

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the answer is simple: The media environment changed — and NBC helped change it.

The Pew Research Center examined coverage of the first 60 days of Trump's first term and compared it with early coverage of the first terms of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Pew reviewed evening newscasts on NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS, along with print coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek. It found Obama's early coverage was substantially more favorable than that of the others — especially Trump. Pew reported that immigration made up 14% of early Trump coverage, while the same topic accounted for less than 1% in the early coverage of the prior presidents.

Translation: Trump immigration coverage wasn't just negative. Compared with other administrations, it was relentless.

Yet Democrats and the media showed remarkably little curiosity about the tactics used during President Barack Obama's mass deportation campaign. Even Obama defenders acknowledge his administration deported more illegal immigrants than Trump has in either term. The difference is not the scale of enforcement. The difference is the scale of outrage.

Critics now claim Obama's Immigration and Customs Enforcement acted more responsibly, avoided "lawlessness," targeted only serious criminals and conducted operations with judicial restraint. But many of the same complaints leveled today at Trump were documented during Obama's presidency — often by liberal organizations.

In May 2014, the ACLU published a report bluntly titled "Speed Over Fairness: Deportation Under the Obama Administration." It cited findings from the Migration Policy Institute showing that 75% of deported individuals never saw a judge before removal. The system had shifted from judicial hearings to administrative expulsions.

The New York Times reached a similar conclusion. Its analysis of internal government records found that two-thirds of nearly 2 million deportations under Obama involved people with minor infractions — including traffic violations — or no criminal record at all. Only 20% involved serious crimes. In April 2014, the Times wrote: "Mr. Obama came to office promising comprehensive immigration reform, but lacking sufficient support, the administration took steps it portrayed as narrowing the focus of enforcement efforts on serious criminals. Yet the records show that the enforcement net actually grew, picking up more and more immigrants with minor or no criminal records."

In April 2014, Human Rights Watch accused Obama of crossing an "inhumane" red line: "This spring, I spoke with half a dozen unauthorized immigrants in southern Texas, all of whom had lived and worked in the United States for years. They were parents of U.S. citizens and held jobs in the community. Each had a story of arrest and deportation by the Border Patrol ... One woman told me about her husband, who was fishing near where he lived in Port Isabel, Texas, 40 miles from the border, when Parks and Wildlife police cited him for not having a permit and called the Border Patrol. After almost 10 years in the U.S., he was deported within two days."

No street protests? No celebrity denunciations? No awards-show rants comparing ICE and CBP to secret police?

Even accounting for differences in border volumes and political climate, the contrast is impossible to ignore. Media attention helps determine which policies become moral crises and which become background noise. During the Obama years, aggressive deportation was largely treated as technocratic governance. Under Trump, immigration enforcement has become a permanent emergency — and a nightly news spectacle.

It is certainly worth debating whether today ICE is targeting "the worst of the worst," as Trump promised, and what Border Czar Tom Homan means when he says every illegal alien is "on the table." But media institutions like NBC influence public opinion as much by what they omit as by what they highlight.

NBC is not merely measuring opinion. It's measuring opinion that has been influenced by its own coverage. NBC then polls the public reaction to its own editorial choices — and reports the result as "breaking news."