Californians sharply divided along partisan lines over immigration attacks, poll finds

California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines this year in Los Angeles and across the country over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to a new poll.

Half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% oppose deporting anyone in the country without legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Probability Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.

But there is a deep difference in opinion based on political orientation.

According to the poll, nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% oppose deporting anyone in the country who is undocumented. Among Republicans, 5% oppose reducing entry and 10% do not believe all undocumented immigrants should be let out.

“The big thing we found, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Probability Lab, which studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “In these views, they fall clearly along party lines. While there are differences in the parties like age and race, in fact, the biggest divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely reflected the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.

One notable finding, Lerman said, was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or knew someone in their family or peer group who was directly affected by deportation efforts.

“It’s a really significant proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are so concerned about deportation efforts that they don’t send their children to school, shop at local stores, go to work,” seek medical care or attend church services.

The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to vote because they are not citizens.

A little over 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the Secretary of State.

“So if we think about the California population in general, that’s a significant underestimate of the impact, even though we’re seeing really significant impacts in communities,” she said.

Earlier this year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in and around Los Angeles that escalated in June, sparking fear and anger in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration has also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to protect federal immigration officials, federal officials said.

There has been chaos for months, with masked, armed agents randomly taking people — many of them Latino — off the streets and from their workplaces and sending many to detention centers, where some have died. Some of the deportees were taken to prisons in El Salvador. Several lawsuits have been filed by government officials and civil rights groups.

In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued an order temporarily barring federal agents from using racial profiling to make indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court allowed the urgent appeal and lifted the order, while the case is pending.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been detained by federal authorities in the Los Angeles area since June 6.

On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted congressional hearings on the impact of immigration raids that took place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document mistreatment and abuse during ICE raids.

While Republican voters largely agreed with Trump’s actions on immigration, 16% said they believed immigration would hurt the state’s economy.

Lerman said the university plans to study whether those numbers have changed because the effects on the economy are being felt more acutely.

“If it continues to affect people, in particular, as we see a really high-level impact on the workforce, then construction, agriculture and all the places where we as an economy really depend. [on immigrant labor]I can imagine some of that even starting to change among Republicans,” she said.

Among Latinos, whose support for Trump has grown in the 2024 election, there are many signs of dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.

Nearly eight in 10 Latinos say Trump’s policies have hurt their community, compared with 69% during his first term in 2019, according to a national poll of US adults released Monday by the Pew Research Center. About 71% said the agency’s deportation efforts had gone too far, up from 56% in March. And it was the first time in two decades that Pew conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their status in the United States has worsened, with more than two-thirds expressing the same sentiment.

Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Voters, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that a third of Latino voters who had previously backed Trump were now reversing their decision, according to a national poll.

Small business owner Brian Guidia is among Latino voters who backed Trump in November because of financial hardship.

“I was tired of fighting, I was tired of seeing my friends’ businesses close,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again. I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years that we had.’…I was upset and heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s why I went this way.

The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he’s not concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president has promised to eliminate “the worst.”

He was dismayed to see the attacks that erupted in Los Angeles earlier this year.

“They’re taking fruit sellers, day laborers, that’s the worst for you?” He remembered the thought.

Over a lunch of Asda tortas and horchata in East L.A., Guidia recalled being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello yard. Agents pushed him in front of a metal gate and demanded to know what hospital he was born in after he said he was an American citizen, according to a video of the incident.

After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Govidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Guidia was detained for investigation into tampering and later released without warrant as a US citizen. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

“At that moment, I was guilty, at that moment I was the worst, which is crazy because I went to see who they were going to get – the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Guidia said. “But when I got there, I was the worst.”