Pew Research Center surveyed 8,512 adults from Jan. 20 to 26, 2026 about Americans’ views of immigration. Read findings on immigration officers’ actions and the public’s response to immigration enforcement.
This survey was in the field on January 24, the day Alex Pretti was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. While the vast majority of interviews were completed prior to the shooting, 12% of respondents completed their interviews January 24-26.
We examined whether Americans’ views on questions about the acceptability of behaviors by immigration officers and ordinary civilians differed after Pretti was killed.
The results suggest that while attitudes were relatively consistent before and after the event, there were modest changes, primarily among Republicans and Republican leaners.
Of course, those who take our surveys earlier and later in the field period aren’t necessarily identical. For example, we know that some harder to reach groups tend to take surveys later in the field period.
To test this, the best way to understand the relationship between two variables while controlling for other factors is often through the statistical method of regression analysis. To do this we limited our sample to Republicans and Republican leaners, as Democrats’ attitudes showed no evidence of systematic change. We then regressed each of our seven survey items on a dummy variable indicating when each respondent took the survey, as well as a mix of political and demographic control variables such as strength of partisanship, age, education, and race or ethnicity, using ordinary least squares regression.
The results of the regression analysis show that while some of the difference between early and late survey respondents on our questions about the actions of ordinary people and the actions of immigration officers can be explained by other differences between these groups besides the date on which they took the survey, some of the differences between early and late respondents remain statistically significant even after controlling for the other variables included in our model.
Republicans’ views on two survey questions in particular appear to be influenced by whether they took the survey before or after Alex Pretti was killed: The acceptability of immigration officers wearing face coverings that hide their identities and the acceptability of immigration officers using a person’s looks or the language they speak as a reason to check their immigration status. However, the size of these differences is relatively modest.
