Nearly half of GOP voters support using military to put immigrants in camps
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Almost half of Republican voters believe the U.S. military should round up undocumented immigrants and put them into detention camps until they can be deported, a new survey finds.
Why it matters: President-elect Trump has suggested that he'll use the military in immigration raids and turn to a 1798 law to put immigrants in camps.
- His base appears to support those plans despite the likely fierce opposition from most Americans.
By the numbers: 46% of Republicans endorse using the military in mass deportation raids and placing immigrants in camps, according to a nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) post-election survey.
- That's more than double that of independent voters (19%) who agree with the idea.
- And that's more than five times as Democratic voters (8%) who supported this policy.
What they're saying: "There have been questions in the Trump era where I've thought...I can't believe that we need to know the answer to this question," Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, tells Axios.
- "I guess the good news is that three-quarters of the country rejects this idea that we should be putting immigrants in the country illegally into internment camps guarded by the military."
- Jones said the bad news is that nearly half of people who consider themselves members of a mainstream political party do.
State of play: Trump said in his recent TIME "Person of the Year" interview that he would be open to using camps to hold detained immigrants in the U.S.
- Trump in the TIME interview suggested deporting 21 million people, which would likely require an increase in detention centers to hold people suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization before they're deported.
Reality check: Study after study shows there are 11 million undocumented people in the country, not 21 million, as Trump has repeatedly and falsely said.
- There are roughly 24.5 million noncitizen immigrants in the U.S., including those here awaiting asylum decisions or otherwise here lawfully, according to the Pew Research Center.
- The U.S. immigration system's backlog of 3.7 million court cases will take four years to resolve at the current pace — but that could balloon to 16 years under Trump's mass deportation plan, according to an Axios analysis.
Zoom in: The PRRI survey also found that American voters who hold highly authoritarian views were six times as likely to endorse putting undocumented immigrants into such camps than American voters who reject authoritarianism (48% v. 8%).
Methodology: The American Values Survey was conducted online Nov. 8 and Dec. 2, 2024. The poll is based on a representative sample of 5,772 adults (age 18 and older) living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia who are part of Ipsos' Knowledge Panel®.
- The margin of sampling error is +/- 1.72 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample.
