Hill/HarrisX Poll: Plurality of Likely Voters Support Criminally Prosecuting Illegal Aliens

A 2020 Democrat plan to decriminalize illegal border crossings at the United States-Mexico border has little support among the American electorate, a new poll finds.

The latest poll by The Hill/HarrisX finds that a plurality of American voters said they support criminally prosecuting illegal aliens who cross the nation’s borders illegally into the U.S.

More than 4-in-10 voters, or about 41 percent, said they supported criminal prosecutions for illegal aliens rather than charging them with civil penalties, as multiple 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates have endorsed, including Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Eric Swalwell.

Only about 32 percent of voters supported making illegal immigration a civil penalty and about 27 percent said they were not sure.

Nearly 7-in-10 Republican voters, a plurality of 36 percent of swing voters, and even 24 percent of Democrat voters said they support criminally prosecuting illegal border crossers. A majority of 53 percent of rural voters said they too preferred criminal prosecutions for illegal aliens over less than 30 percent who said they supported changing the law to fine illegal aliens with civil penalties.

The poll comes as 2020 Democrats have made decriminalizing illegal border crossings a central part of their open borders platform. Surging Democrat candidate Elizabeth Warren doubled-down on her support for decriminalizing illegal immigration this week.

“I think that the whole notion of criminalizing the approach to coming across the border without documentation is not making anybody any safer,” Warren said. “We just need to be in a different position on this.”

The Democrats’ plan to decriminalize illegal immigration would make it so that the millions of illegal aliens and border crossers who have inundated the nation’s borders over the past decade would be treated as civil violators, rather than being criminally prosecuted. Today, there are roughly 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living throughout the U.S., about half of whom illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.