CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten on Monday said he is “not really surprised” that President Donald Trump has sent his border czar Tom Homan to tackle the growing protests in Minnesota against the immigration crackdown, and suggested Kristi Noem’s tanking popularity as the reason the homeland security secretary wasn’t sent instead.
“ICE, DHS, Kristi Noem have been a political disaster” in polling, Enten told “News Central” anchor Kate Bolduan.
ICE’s net approval rating during Trump’s first term was “pretty even at zero points” but dropped down “way in the basement” by 17 percentage points in June 2025 “when all that stuff was going on in Los Angeles,” he said. “But then, after Minneapolis, it’s even lower, -27 points on the net approval rating of ICE. Of course, this all being done under Kristi Noem.”
For the Department of Homeland Security as a whole, Enten said it’s “just the same exact story.”
Its first-term Trump rating was “pretty gosh darn good” with 59% but now it’s down to about 42%, said Enten, noting it’s “the same story we’re seeing no matter which poll question we look at.”
“The popularity of ICE, of DHS, has completely fallen under the second Trump term,” he continued. “All the actions in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, in these major American cities, have been very much rejected by the American people. It has been a political disaster for the second Trump administration.”
Enten noted that Noem herself “has not been popular in everything she’s done” and “every single poll that has been conducted on Kristi Noem’s popularity, every single one, the net approval has been negative.”
