Trump’s immigration crackdown divides rural voters as midterms approach, AP-KFF poll finds

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than a year into President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, a poll finds that voters in rural parts of the country are divided on whether those immigration policies have benefited or harmed their communities.

In The Associated Press-KFF survey of more than 2,000 rural voters in August, about a third said the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement had been positive for their community and about a third said it had been negative. The remaining 3 in 10, roughly, said it had no impact.

Trump promised tough enforcement on the campaign trail in 2024, and the survey highlights how a cornerstone of his base, rural supporters of his Make America Great Again movement, are especially likely to say they see a benefit where they live from the Republican president’s stringent immigration policies.

Yet many rural voters also say immigrants are a key part of their local economies, and some believe Trump’s immigration actions have gone too far.

Laura Leigh Taylor, a 37-year-old farmer who voted for Trump in 2024, said she disapproves of the wide-ranging scope of Trump’s immigration crackdown, which resulted in a friend’s hardworking father being deported.

“I understand getting rid of the rapists and the murderers,” she said. “But all the people that fell in between that really weren’t doing nothing but taking care of their family.”

Taylor now regrets her vote for Trump. As a resident of Smithville, Georgia, a town of about 600, Taylor thinks she will vote for Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November because, she said, the Democrats have been the ones talking about families being uprooted by Trump’s immigration enforcement.

“Just because of that simple fact, I’m going to go with him,” Taylor said.

Most rural voters want politicians to talk about immigration

Roughly three-quarters of rural voters say it’s “extremely” or “very” important for midterm candidates to talk about immigration, though that’s lower than the share who want them to address the cost of living, fraud in government programs or healthcare costs.

Rural voters don’t overwhelmingly think Trump’s immigration policies have helped their communities, but they are also less likely than the general public to say that Trump has overstepped in his efforts, which have involved mass deportations and rapid deportations of immigrants to countries where they have no ties.

Only about 4 in 10 rural voters say Trump has “gone too far” in restricting legal immigration or deporting immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization, below the 55% of U.S. adults overall who said the same in a September AP-NORC poll.

John Thomas, a 55-year-old from Liberty, Kentucky, supports Trump’s efforts to deport people without legal status. Thomas, who has just been approved for disability benefits after injuring his back in 2008, believes they put too much of a burden on the healthcare system. Regulating immigration, he said, is a means of providing better healthcare to Americans.

“They’ve been taking from everybody,” Thomas said of immigrants. “People that really need this stuff can’t get it because of them.”

David Grabowski, a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, said that research suggests immigrants use less healthcare than native-born Americans. “It is hard to argue that they are placing an undue burden on the system,” he said, because many immigrants work in healthcare and pay taxes.

Most rural voters see the economic importance of immigrants

Immigrants often play key roles in sustaining local industries, including by filling jobs in manufacturing, healthcare and agriculture. The survey suggests the vast majority of rural voters see immigrants in the country legally as an important part of their local economies.

Shannon Monnat, director of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University and president of the Rural Sociological Society, said immigration has been a demographic lifeline for much of rural America. Rural areas have been losing young adults for years, she said.

“For a lot of small towns, immigrants are the reason the school and hospital stayed open and the county didn’t shrink,” Monnat said.

About 7 in 10 rural voters see immigrants who are in the country legally as “very” or “somewhat” important to their local economies, and a similar share say the same about temporary or seasonal agriculture workers. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants take seasonal jobs on U.S. farms each year, with most of them coming from Mexico, on H-2A visas.

Rural voters with a connection to agriculture and farming are more likely than those without one to say that temporary or seasonal workers are “very important” to their local economies, the poll found.

Jeff Miller, a 56-year-old Republican hydro blaster and vacuum technician, has mostly been pleased with Trump’s agenda, and he believes things are “heading in the right direction.” The one thing Miller has struggled with is Trump’s aggressive immigration policy, which he blames for the deportation of a “really good worker” and friend, who was removed from the U.S. when his work permit expired.

Miller, from Racine, Ohio, said he would support exceptions for hard workers, or just a less aggressive approach.

“There’s kind of an up-and-down thing because I lost a really good friend over that,” Miller said.

Rural voters are much less likely to say immigrants who are in the country illegally are beneficial, but 45% say they are at least “somewhat” important to local economies.

Albert Martinez, a 70-year-old Democrat from San Diego, Texas, voted for Trump in 2016, but he now believes the Trump administration has “gone amok.” The Army veteran said he is a proponent of getting criminals out of the country, but that is not what he is seeing happening with current immigration enforcement.

“They started doing everybody across the board,” Martinez said. “Innocent kids and women, people who work in restaurants, people who work in hotels, people who are building homes, people who are doing masonry work, and innocent, good, taxpaying people. Taxpayers. It’s insane.”

Rural MAGA voters support Trump’s immigration policies

Some of Trump’s most loyal supporters — rural Republicans who consider themselves MAGA supporters — are about twice as likely as rural, non-MAGA Republicans to see a benefit to Trump’s immigration policies where they live.

Roughly 4 in 10 rural voters identify as MAGA Republicans, while about 1 in 10 are Republicans but not MAGA supporters.

About two-thirds of rural MAGA Republicans say Trump’s immigration policies have had a positive impact where they live. Roughly half say the Trump administration has “not gone far enough” on deporting immigrants in the country illegally, while about half say his actions have been “about right.”

Katherine Reed, a 27-year-old Republican who supports the MAGA movement, has been pleased to see the Trump administration’s deportation policies play out. The resident of Mount Pleasant, Texas, believes her community has always been safe but that the administration’s policies have had a positive impact by reducing violent crime nationwide, saying, “It’s made life for people a lot safer.”

She believes if someone comes to America, they should “respect the law of the land” and “do it legally.”

“I want really amazing people to become Americans,” Reed said. “That’s the whole point of America.”

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The poll of 2,241 U.S. adults registered to vote in rural areas of the country was conducted Aug. 12-24, 2026, using a sample drawn from the probability-based SSRS Opinion Panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. In collaboration with AP, KFF researchers worked to design the survey sample and questionnaire, analyze and report findings.

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This report is a collaboration between The Associated Press and KFF Health News. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.