Drs. Will McCorkle, Lina-Maria Murillo, and E. Kyle Romero are 2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellows studying the intersection of politics, religion, and immigration and migration. This Spotlight Analysis is the result of their original collaborative research project conducted with support from PRRI.
On June 25, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Mullin v. Doe that the Trump administration can remove Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian and Syrian migrants. This means that up to 350,000 Haitians and 4,000 Syrians are now at risk for deportation. With nearly 1.3 million people lawfully in the U.S. under TPS, this seismic shift in immigration policy has rocked TPS holders and refugee rights activists across the country. Although Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential win came with a promise of massive deportations of “illegal criminals,” many Americans believe these kinds of changes in immigration law are extreme. This Spotlight Analysis examines how the Supreme Court’s ruling ending TPS protections for Haitians and Syrians conflicts with American public opinion. We find that Haitian asylum-seekers receive high public support regardless of partisan divides. In short, there is a disconnect between the Trump administration’s immigration policies and Americans’ more humanitarian views.
To better understand attitudes on immigration policy, we conducted a survey experiment among a nationally representative survey of 1,500 Americans with support from PRRI, fielded by Ipsos in April 2026. The sample was randomly divided into five groups, each presented with a scenario describing an immigrant family coming to the border and asking for asylum due to the dangers they faced in their home country. One group received a neutral scenario about an immigrant family, while the remaining four groups each received the same scenario but with the immigrant family’s origin specified as a Guatemalan, Ukrainian, white South African, or a Haitian family. Relative to the neutral scenario (the control group), in which 61% of Americans supported asylum for an immigrant family, support was higher for those specified as Haitian (65%) and Ukrainian (64%) families, and lower for Guatemalan (56%) and white South African families (56% each).
Given the extreme polarization among Americans on immigration, support for a Haitian immigrant family varied significantly by party with strong majorities of Democrats (90%) and independents (65%) favoring granting asylum, compared with 45% of Republicans. Despite this partisan divide, most Americans do not favor deporting Haitian asylum seekers, or by extension, those with TPS.
Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere due in part to decades of discord between Europe and the United States after Haiti won its independence from France in 1804. Extreme poverty and social upheaval have produced a long history of
Most recently, under the Biden administration we witnessed the brutal border patrol response to Haitian migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. During the run-up to the 2024 presidential campaign, JD Vance and Trump spread baseless claims about Haitians eating dogs and cats. Although these claims later proliferated across social media even after being repeatedly debunked, our survey experiment finds that many Americans support granting asylum to Haitian families.
The Trump administration and the Supreme Court’s push to end TPS for Haitians does not reflect a majority American opinion. These findings point to substantial public support for humanitarian responses to forced migration, a view especially important as climate change and economic instability continue to push people to flee.
