By trying to deport student activists he describes as antisemitic “terrorist sympathizers,” you might think, President Donald Trump is cannily choosing unpopular targets who are unlikely to attract much public support. But according to recent polling by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), most Americans are not fans of that speech-chilling initiative.
According to the latest iteration of FIRE’s quarterly National Speech Index survey, which was conducted from April 4 through April 11, just 26 percent of Americans “support” or “strongly support” a policy of “deporting foreigners legally in the United States on a student visa for expressing pro-Palestine views,” while 52 percent—twice as many— “oppose” or “strongly oppose” that policy. The rest were undecided.
When FIRE asked about “deporting foreigners legally in the United States with a green card for expressing pro-Palestine views,” the results were similar. While 23 percent of respondents thought that was a good idea, 53 percent disagreed, and 23 percent took no position.
“Deporting someone simply for disagreeing with the government’s foreign policy preferences strikes at the very freedoms the First Amendment was designed to protect,” says Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research adviser. “Americans are right to reject this kind of viewpoint-based punishment.”
The results might have been different, of course, if the targeted views had been described as “anti-Israel,” which would be a fair characterization of the campus protests inspired by the war that Hamas started on October 7, 2023. The respondents might have been even less inclined to reject “viewpoint-based punishment” if the survey had asked about foreigners with “pro-Hamas,” “pro-terrorist,” or “anti-Semitic” views, the more tendentious labels that Trump and his underlings prefer.
Still, assuming the respondents were familiar with this controversy and understood the range of opinions covered by the phrase “pro-Palestine views,” the results suggest that Americans are more skeptical of speech-based deportation than Trump probably expected. They might be even more worried if they recognized the startling breadth of the statutory authority on which Trump is relying to expel people whose views offend him, based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s unilateral determination that they pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests.
Americans also seem leery of Trump’s efforts to peremptorily deport suspected gang members, sometimes based on weakly supported allegations. Sixty-four percent of respondents said they opposed “deporting foreigners legally in the United States for having a soccer tattoo that was interpreted as a gang tattoo.”
That specific scenario alludes to Jerce Reyes Barrios, one of the Venezuelans who were deported and consigned to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month, in apparent defiance of a court order. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm noted, Reyes Barrios, an asylum seeker, seems to have been identified as a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua largely because of his “tattoo of a soccer ball with a crown and the Spanish word Dios,” which his lawyer said signified that he was “a former professional soccer player and a fan of Real Madrid,” as opposed to a dangerously violent gangster.
The unchallenged reliance on such evidence, which also has figured in other deportation cases, primarily implicates the Fifth Amendment right to due process. But there is also a First Amendment angle when the government treats body art as proof of criminality, which is presumably why FIRE included this question.
While tattoo-based deportation seems decidedly unpopular, the FIRE survey suggests that Americans are less upset about Trump’s financial pressure on universities. Just 37 percent of respondents said they opposed “rescinding federal funding from colleges and universities for not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism on campus.” Opposition to “rescinding federal funding from colleges and universities that fail to disband DEI programs” and “rescinding federal funding from colleges and universities that fail to arrest student protesters who express pro-Palestine views” was stronger: 45 percent and 47 percent, respectively.
The survey also found that 50 percent of Americans completely reject the proposition that “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” Although that result may strike civil libertarians as disappointing, it is the highest level of support for freedom of speech recorded in response to this question since the first National Speech Index survey in January 2024, when 56 percent of respondents were at least “slightly” inclined to agree that First Amendment protections are too broad. That number has dropped steadily since then.
By contrast, Americans’ impression of how free speech is faring in the United States has fluctuated since the first survey. In January 2024, 69 percent of respondents thought “things in America” were “headed in…the wrong direction” when it came to “whether people are able to freely express their views.” That number dropped to 63 percent in April 2024, rose to 69 percent in July 2024, and fell in the next two surveys, reaching a low of 59 percent last January. It rose again in the latest survey, in which 62 percent of respondents were pessimistic about free speech trends, which is still lower than the peaks recorded during the Biden administration.
The survey also asked people “how much confidence” they had that “Donald Trump will protect your First Amendment rights.” By and large, it turned out, not much: Fifty-one percent had either “no confidence at all” or “very little confidence,” while 33 percent quantified their confidence as “full” or “quite a lot” and 16 percent settled on “some.” The no/very little confidence rating for Trump is up from 41 percent in January.
If you are inclined toward optimism, you might interpret those results as evidence that Americans are turned off by Trump’s various attempts to punish people for speech that irks him, whether through deportation, regulation, litigation, criminal investigations, or executive decrees targeting disfavored lawyers and journalists. But FIRE asked the same question about California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the results were similar: Fifty-three percent of respondents had either “no” or “very little” confidence in Newsom’s commitment to First Amendment rights.
The corresponding number for Joe Biden was a bit lower in April 2024: 45 percent, compared to 47 percent for Trump at that point. The gap between Trump and Kamala Harris was slightly bigger last October: 48 percent vs. 42 percent.
In all of these cases, most people were not highly confident that politicians could be trusted to respect freedom of speech, which makes sense. If that were a safe bet, we would not need a constitutional guarantee.
