Over the weekend, CBS News published a new poll with the headline, “Poll finds support for Trump’s deportation program falls.” The story seemed straightforward. But the story behind the story is worth looking into.

The poll found that 44% of those surveyed approved of the way President Donald Trump is handling the issue of immigration, while 56% disapprove. After that came a number of more specific questions. What do you think about “the Trump administration’s program to find and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally”? Forty-nine percent approved, while 51% disapproved.

Then: “Do you think the Trump administration is mainly prioritizing dangerous criminals for deportation, or is it mainly prioritizing people who are not dangerous criminals?” Forty-four percent said prioritizing dangerous criminals, while 56% said prioritizing those who are not dangerous criminals. And: “So far, do you think the Trump administration is focusing too much, about the right amount, or not enough on deporting immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally?” Fifty-one percent said too much, 33% said the right amount, and 15% said not enough.

“On matters of deportation, differences hinge on who, and how many, Americans see as being targeted, as well as the use of detention facilities,” wrote CBS. “The Republican and MAGA political base remain overwhelmingly approving of it all, but the rest of the American public has become less so.”

It was all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, until this question: “Do you think Donald Trump’s policies are making the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border go up, go down, or not change?” Unlike an opinion question, this was a fact-based query, with a right and a wrong answer.

Sixty-four percent gave the obviously correct response — Trump has made the number of migrants crossing the border go down. But 28% said the Trump policies have made no difference, which was flatly wrong. And 8% said crossings have actually gone up, which was crazy wrong.

Just for the record, the Border Patrol recorded 2,206,436 encounters with illegal border crossers in fiscal year 2022, the first full year of Joe Biden’s presidency. (The government keeps the numbers in fiscal years — fiscal year 2022 ran from Oct. 1, 2021, to Sept. 30, 2022.) In fiscal year 2023, there were 2,045,838 encounters, and in fiscal year 2024 there were 1,530,523. So far in Trump’s presidency, there were 8,348 encounters in February, 7,183 in March, 8,378 in April, 8,723 in May, and 6,072 in June. You do the math; there has been an off-the-cliff drop in encounters since Trump became president. And just to emphasize things, even of those small numbers of crossings, U.S. officials are not allowing any of the illegal crossers to stay in the country.

So how did so many poll respondents get the situation so wrong? Put the 28% and the 8% together, and you get 36% of Americans who don’t know what Trump has done on the border. Or maybe they know but will not acknowledge it. So take a closer look into the details of that simple question: Have Trump’s policies made the number of migrants crossing the border go up, or down, or made no difference?

Looking into the details of the poll, the numbers for Democratic respondents were striking. A full 43% of Democrats said Trump’s policies have made no difference, while an additional 10% said those policies have made border crossings go up. That’s a majority who either do not know or who reject the facts on the border. Just 47% of Democrats knew, or admitted, the correct answer.

Some of it is just lack of knowledge. In any poll, there will be some number of people who don’t know basic political facts. But the Democratic numbers seem larger than that. Perhaps respondents have been reading and watching news outlets that largely ignore the border issue but pay a lot of attention to the deportation issue. Or perhaps they know the situation on the border but just don’t want to acknowledge it.

In any event, the answers to the border crossings question could tell us something about the answers to all the other immigration questions in the CBS poll, and perhaps in other polls as well. What do people mean when they say they do not approve of Trump’s “immigration” policy? Do they mean border security? Do they mean ICE enforcement operations? Do they mean action against people who broke the law by entering the country and then broke it again by committing some other crime? Or those who broke the law by entering but have not committed any additional crimes?

And what do they know about what the Trump administration is doing? Do they know about the border crossing numbers? Do they know what the ICE raids are accomplishing? A lot of that will depend on what, if any, news coverage they read and watch. For example, for the worst years of the Biden border incursion, Fox News was the only national news organization to cover what was one of the most important stories of recent decades. People who got their news from other sources might not have known what was going on.

Why did those news sources downplay such obviously consequential news? That’s another story. The fact is, it’s entirely possible significant numbers of Americans, even now, are not fully informed on what is going on in the Trump administration under the heading of “immigration.” The new CBS poll, with its seemingly confusing results, appears to show that.

This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3477126/measuring-what-americans-think-about-immigration-cbs-poll/.