CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said on Wednesday that legal immigrant voters are largely in favor of President Donald Trump’s hawkish immigration policies.
Foreign-born citizens have moved to support the political right’s views on immigration, with the Republican Party currently holding an eight-point lead on the question of who is more trusted on immigration policy, Enten said on “CNN News Central,” citing his own aggregate data. In 2020, the Democrat Party held a 32-point lead among this demographic on the same question.
“Immigrant citizens, immigrant voters and foreign-born voters have gone tremendously to the right on this issue in 2024 and 2025 versus where they were in 2020,” Enten said. “If you go back to 2020, Democrats get this, they held a 32-point lead on this issue. Immigrant voters were in the Democratic camp. Jump forward to 2024 and 2025, look at that shift! A 40-point shift toward the right among immigrant voters. Republicans now lead on this issue by eight points over Democrats, more so than any other group that I could find. The group of voters who became more hawkish on immigration were in fact immigrants themselves, immigrants who are registered to vote in this country.” (RELATED: CNN’s Harry Enten Says Trump’s Approval Rating on Immigration Has Surged ‘Like A Rocket’)
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Trump earned a significantly higher percentage of the vote among immigrant citizens, jumping from 36% in 2016 to 47% in 2024, according to Enten’s aggregate data.
“There may be all this stuff right now on undocumented immigrants and Trump being harsh on them. But immigrant voters themselves have increasingly like Donald Trump and have increasingly moved to the right on immigration into the Republican camp,” Enten continued.
Immigrant voters have largely shifted their opinions to hold a negative view of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants’ net favorability rating among legal immigrants stands at -6 points in 2025 after it had been 23-points above water in 2020.
The Trump administration has cracked down on illegal border crossings, and have sought to increase deportations and arrests of criminals in the U.S. illegally. Arrests conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surged to 2,200 a day as of June 3, and have notched more than 100,000 illegal migrant arrests since Trump took office on Jan. 20.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant crossings have fallen 99.99% during the Trump administration, while daily border encounters are down 93%, according to data released after the administration’s first 100 days in office. In just the first month of the Trump administration, border encounters were the lowest they had been since 1968.
Trump won on the issue of immigration in the 2024 election and became the first Republican nominee to win the Hispanic male vote. The president won Hispanic men 54% to 44% against former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to an NBC News exit poll.
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