A strong majority of registered voters, including most Hispanics, would support a national program to deport illegal aliens from the United States, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll.
The poll, published Sunday, found that 62 percent of registered voter respondents would back “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally.” Thirty-eight percent of voters would oppose such a program.
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A majority of 53 percent of Hispanics would support the deportation of illegal aliens en masse, while 47 percent would be against it.
Majorities of Republicans (88 percent) and independents (60 percent) would support a widescale deportation effort, as would 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 strong proponent of a widescale deportation operation. Last September, he vowed to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if elected, and speaking on Thursday in Phoenix, Trump said he wants “deportation” while “Biden wants an invasion.”
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The poll found that, if a national deportation program comes to fruition, most respondents would favor empowering local law enforcement to try and identify illegal aliens in their communities. Of the respondents, 62 percent said they would support “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 be in favor of 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) would support this as well.
Voters are split 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 would oppose large detention centers, while 48 percent would support them.
Hispanics are evenly split on the detention centers, while a majority of independents, 56 percent, are against them.
The poll sampled 1,615 registered voters from June 5-7 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.
