The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind.
- Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans approve of sending additional U.S. troops to the border (88%) and increasing deportations (86%). More than six-in-ten strongly approve of these actions.
- 80% of Republicans approve of cutting federal funds to cities and states if they do not cooperate with deportations
- 72% of Republicans approve of suspending asylum applications, with 38% saying they strongly approve.
You can want all of those things and still be against eg ice agents raiding a school. It would be more accurate if it focused exclusively on the more egregious ICE activities.
They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.
They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.
The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
That's kidnapping.
Yeah but "the totalitarian Neonazis who wanted to deploy secret police were only a slight majority" is really faint praise.
Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.