Republicans are betting that a massive infusion of cash for immigration enforcement in their sprawling tax bill approved Thursday will help them maintain a political advantage, despite evidence of waning public support for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Trump made the surge in border crossings under the Biden administration a central issue during his 2024 campaign, and he consistently said immigration, not the economy, was the top concern of voters. As some Republicans wavered this week on supporting the legislation — which is projected to slash Medicaid funding and add more than $3 trillion to the national debt — his top aides reiterated that message to consolidate GOP support.

Vice President JD Vance declared that “everything else … is immaterial” compared with the new resources for border enforcement.

“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” Vance wrote on X. The Republican tax bill “fixes this problem.”

But with illegal border crossings at record lows, some political analysts and pollsters question whether the GOP’s push to turbocharge Trump’s deportation agenda with nearly $170 billion in new funding over five years will yield the same political fortune.

Immigration experts and political analysts acknowledged the money would help the administration in its drive to meet Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants this year.

But they warned that plans to hire thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Customs and Border Protection officers could also lead to more widespread use of aggressive enforcement tactics that have been blocked or slowed by federal courts and begun to generate a political backlash.

“It all depends on whether they will actually focus [enforcement] on the people the American public wants to be thrown out — that’s recent arrivals and those who have committed crimes — or whether they focus it on their neighbors who are running the local stores, picking their crops, preparing their meat or cleaning their houses,” said Whit Ayres, a prominent GOP pollster.

Trump’s public approval ratings on immigration have tumbled in recent weeks, according to polls. A Quinnipiac University survey conducted late last month found that 41 percent of voters support the president’s handling of the issue, while 57 percent disapprove.

And though polls show much of the public remains unaware of what is included in the GOP’s tax bill, just 24 percent of Americans approve of the legislation’s plan to spend $45 billion on new detention resources for ICE, with 61 percent opposing it, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in early June.

“One of President Trump’s biggest campaign promises was to secure the border and execute the largest mass deportation operation in history,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “The One Big Beautiful Bill’s provisions to hire more ICE and Border Agents is hugely popular amongst the American people, and the bill will provide ICE with the resources necessary to continue fulfilling the President’s promise. Any ‘experts’ who think Americans aren’t behind President Trump on immigration must have been living under a rock for the last 10 years.”

Constrained by staff shortages and limited detention bed space, the Trump administration has fallen well short of the president’s arrest and deportation goals. The bill is designed to help change that.

Authorities said the tax and spending package would allow the administration to add 10,000 ICE agents and 8,500 CBP officials and expand the number of detention beds. In recent months, the total number of detainees has surpassed the federally allocated bed space, and some immigration detention facilities have experienced overcrowding.

Republicans have also set aside more than $46 billion for the construction of walls and barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The bill adds a far smaller amount — $3.3 billion — to support immigration courts, drug trafficking and other policing programs, and it caps the number of immigration judges at 800, despite a U.S. immigration court backlog of more than 3 million cases.

“With this bill passing, the main constraints on the administration’s ability to carry out mass deportations are mostly gone,” said Andrea Flores, an immigration policy expert at FWD.us who served in the Biden administration.

She warned that the Trump administration would probably be emboldened to pursue more extreme measures, including using military personnel to help ICE and CBP make arrests and removals. Flores pointed to the street protests in Los Angeles last month over ICE raids of local businesses, which prompted Trump to dispatch National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to protect federal buildings, a move that further inflamed demonstrators.

“Communities should expect to see the type of enforcement we’ve been witnessing in Los Angeles on a mass scale,” she said.

Democrats have denounced the Republican legislation as providing tax breaks for wealthy Americans while slashing social safety net programs for working-class people. But lawmakers have been more muted about the potential harms of the immigration provisions, a sign that the party continues to struggle to find a coherent message on the issue after Trump’s resounding election victory last fall.

Reports of ICE arrests of immigrants who have not committed violent crimes — including those who report for mandatory immigration court hearings — have provided Democrats with an opportunity to highlight what they call the Trump administration’s abusive and inhumane tactics and offer a contrast.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) sued the Trump administration for dispatching National Guard troops in Los Angeles, and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) gave an emotional speech on the Senate floor recounting being detained by Secret Service agents after interrupting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem during an immigration news conference in that city last month.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) said this week that the GOP bill “supercharges ICE’s efforts to send those masked men into our streets and our communities everywhere to kidnap and disappear immigrants of all legal statuses including U.S. citizens, people with legal visas and those with no criminal record — and for the first time ever it imposes a fee on asylum seekers.”

Videos of ICE agents at home improvement stores and entering private homes have gone viral on social media, and groups or apps dedicated to cop-watching and ICE-tracking have gathered steam.

In an interview last month with The Washington Post, White House border czar Tom Homan played down polling that showed declining support for Trump’s handling of immigration and blamed what he sees as unfair news coverage.

Still, Trump has at times appeared to respond to public pressure, with his administration vacillating on whether to continue to conduct enforcement raids on farms, some of which rely heavily on undocumented workers. Last month, the president posted on social media that “changes are coming” to help “protect our Farmers.”

The Department of Homeland Security issued guidance instructing agents not to conduct immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants — only to reverse the directive days later. Then, on Tuesday, Trump again suggested there would be exemptions for undocumented farmworkers and those in the hotel industry.

“We have … a lot of cases where ICE will go into a farm and these are guys working there for 10, 15 years, no problem,” Trump said this week while touring a new immigrant detention center built on alligator-infested swampland in South Florida. The president suggested his administration would create a system to register immigrant farmworkers so “they can be here legally,” a position that has been opposed by hard-line anti-immigration groups.

The extraordinary new resources for ICE stand to turn the department into the nation’s largest law enforcement agency over the next half-decade. But the planned expansion is not without logistical challenges, said Muzaffar Chishti of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. The hiring of federal officers and building of additional detention space can take months or years, a potential roadblock for an administration eager for swift change.

Some analysts faulted the Trump administration for pursuing an incomplete approach to immigration, focusing on deportation and border enforcement without creating new pathways for migrants to enter the country legally.

“The issue we have now is … we have a system that we only want to fund in parts,” said Jason Houser, who was ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration. “We’re not trying to fix the system, we’re trying to fix one part of the system because there’s political outcomes that his administration wants to create.”

The coming months will test the extent to which the Trump administration can fulfill its promise to carry out mass deportations. It will also measure the political consequences of implementing such a policy and help determine the electoral landscape ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who is critical of Trump, said the debate has shifted from the president’s focus on border security to public concerns about the administration’s enforcement overreach and trampling of due process rights.

“People don’t perceive the border to be out of control. Trump’s success [there] has taken away his most salient message,” Madrid said. Now, he said, it’s “becoming this constitutional issue.”