Majority of voters say surge at border is a crisis: poll

A vast majority of voters say they believe the surge in immigrants at the southern border is a crisis, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill on Monday. 

Eighty percent of the poll’s respondents said the current situation at the border is “a crisis that needs to be addressed immediately,” while 20 percent said it was “something that can be dealt with by the immigration system we have currently.” 

However, respondents were split over whether unaccompanied minors who crossed the southern border into the U.S. were being kept in humane conditions. Fifty-four percent said children were being treated humanely, while 46 percent said they were being treated inhumanely. 

Roughly 170,000 migrants were apprehended at the U.S. southern border in March, marking a 15-year high. Additionally, 22,000 unaccompanied migrant children are currently in the U.S. 

The situation has plagued the Biden administration, with Republicans taking most opportunities to hit the president over the issue. The president said in an interview with NBC News last week that his administration has “gotten control” of the situation. 

The White House said this past week that the number of children being held in border facilities has fallen 84 percent from its March peak.

Additionally, Biden blamed former President Trump for the situation at the border, saying he inherited the problem from his predecessor. 

“They didn’t plan for, which comes every year, this flow, whether it’s 22,000 or 10,000,” Biden said. “They didn’t have the beds that were available, they didn’t plan for the overflow. They didn’t plan for the Department of Health and Human Services to have places to take the kid from the border patrol and put them in beds where there’s security and there were people that could take care of them.”

The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey of 1,872 registered voters was conducted from April 27 to 29. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and The Harris Poll.

Full poll results will be posted online later this week. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. As a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval.