For years, Republicans have had some reliable terra firma: If they were talking about immigration and border security, they were winning.

Even amid the backlash from Donald Trump’s 2016 pledge to ban all Muslim immigrants to his 2024 amplification of baseless claims that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—immigration remained a durable, winning issue for the GOP.

Now the ground is shifting under them.

A torrent of viral images from Minnesota and beyond as Trump’s immigration agents stepped up their shambolic interior campaign of enforcement in recent months — and the killing of two people in Minneapolis in two separate incidents this past month — have led to a loud public backlash, soured voters on the GOP’s approach and eroded President Donald Trump’s standing on the issue ahead of the looming midterms.

The broad sweep of public polling shows Trump fumbling what has historically been his party’s strongest issue, which even Democrats concede paved his path back to the White House. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found this week Trump hit a second-term trough on the issue, with a majority of Americans — 58 percent — saying his crackdown has gone too far. Only 39 percent approve of his handling of immigration, down two points from earlier this month, and an 11-point erosion from last February. What’s more, a poll from the Democratic-aligned Searchlight Institute this week found that 58 percent of likely midterm voters want ICE to be reined in.

“The image that has been created is not a good thing,” said Jose Arango, the Republican chair of Hudson County, New Jersey, a heavily Democratic area with a large Hispanic population that shifted rightward in 2024. “We’re losing in the public relations campaign.”

Even before Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis, Trump’s own voters were fretting over his agenda. A plurality of Americans said the president’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive — including 1 in 5 voters who backed Trump in 2024, according to the latest POLITICO Poll. More than 1 in 3 Trump voters said that while they support his immigration agenda, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.

And another new round of polling on Thursday could give Democrats more ammo as voters move away from Trump’s immigration agenda. The Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC’s latest polling, shared exclusively with Blue Light News and being sent to lawmakers, donors and campaigns Thursday, shows not only a growing number of likely voters who disapprove of ICE, but also a majority in favor of Democrats’ strategy of demands for reform even if it means a partial government shutdown, with 54 percent also saying they would blame the GOP and Trump for the shutdown and not accepting ICE reforms. These numbers are especially telling as the biggest shifts occur “among moderates, non-MAGA Republicans, and key swing voters,” the polling memo said.

As former President Joe Biden and his administration officials left themselves electorally exposed on the issue, then-candidate Donald Trump exploited those vulnerabilities with vows to seal the southern border and enact the largest deportation campaign in American history. But his enforcement actions have focused less on the border, which polls show most voters approve of, and more on the nation’s interior, drawing the ire of Trump-curious commentators like the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan and raising alarm among Republicans.

“The president can feel, generally, that his policies at the border have been largely supported by a majority of Americans. But what he’s doing inside the border seems to be not working,” said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican who runs one of the most conservative large cities in the nation but backed Kamala Harris in 2024.

One longtime Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns in 2020 and 2024, granted anonymity to candidly assess Republicans’ standing, expressed consternation over ICE’s deployment to a place like Minnesota, far from the southern border.

“When I think of immigrants broadly, I don’t think of Minnesota,” the strategist said. “People want to see, like, okay, ‘I voted for taking criminal illegal immigrants and getting them out of the country. I want to see criminal illegal immigrants taken out of the country. I want to see more miles of wall being built.’ I feel like we talked about the wall weekly in Trump 1. I don’t remember the last time we talked about the wall in Trump 2.”

All of which raises an uncomfortable question for Republicans: Is the party in danger of ceding one of its best issues back to Democrats?

“Immigration used to be a winning issue for Democrats back when we made clear we took enforcement seriously,” said Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) and top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who commissioned the Searchlight polling shared with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as he shuttled toward another potential shutdown over the issue. “It can be a winning issue for us again if we are smart about how we handle this.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a rising Democratic star who won his seat in 2024 at the same time Trump carried his state, campaigned in key Latino areas for his party in New Jersey, Virginia and Miami’s mayoral elections last year, and who has launched his own border security and immigration platform, told Blue Light News his party has to build trust with swing voters.

“We have to be the party that talks about professional, legal enforcement of our immigration laws with an understanding that criminals need to be deported and the border needs to be secure, and that we have to move to a sane compromise when it comes to immigration reform,” Gallego said.

It wasn’t so long ago that was the reality: As recently as 2013, under then-President Barack Obama, the majority of Americans said the Democratic Party better represents their feelings on immigration than Republicans did.

What does the GOP risk ahead of the midterms if it doesn’t find a better message?

“I think you’ll see the numbers continue to suffer,” the longtime GOP strategist said.

Gallego, who has called for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to be fired, said that gives Democrats an opportunity.

“If I was the Republicans right now, I would be very worried about what the future looks like in terms of elections, and Stephen Miller may have basically created a political tsunami among voters, both Latino voters as well as just kind of moderate voters,” Gallego said. “That’s going to come back and haunt them, going into the 2026 election.”

Alec Hernández, Lisa Kashinsky and Ali Bianco contributed to this report.