ICE makes these swing voters anxious, but they don’t want to ‘abolish ICE’
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political correspondent Ashley Lopez, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast for Tuesday, February 11th, 2026. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. |
| 0:11.1 | I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. |
| 0:17.0 | And today on the show, it's another edition of our swing voter series. We're checking in monthly with voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and switch to Donald Trump in 2024 to see how they're feeling about everything right now. We heard from Swing Voters in Pennsylvania last month. You can go find that show earlier in the feed. But today we're going to Arizona. Ashley, tell us a little bit more about the |
| 0:38.1 | voters we're going to hear from today. Yeah. So just like last time, we talked to 14 voters, |
| 0:41.9 | seven in each focus group. This time, there was a pretty good mix politically. Four people out of |
| 0:48.5 | the 14 identified as Democrats, three as Republicans, and we got seven independents, which make up a big chunk of |
| 0:56.2 | swing voter. So this was a really good mix of folks. |
| 0:58.9 | Was there any broad takeaways, I guess, big picture before we drill down into specific issues? |
| 1:04.5 | Sure. So not surprisingly because we're in Arizona or, you know, virtually in our case, |
| 1:10.4 | in Arizona, a border state, immigration and |
| 1:13.1 | ICE were very top of mind when Rich Tao from Engages, who moderated these focus groups, |
| 1:20.2 | asked, you know, at the top, give me a word, something top of mind, what is really concerning |
| 1:25.0 | you right now? Almost unanimously, we heard immigration, we heard |
| 1:28.6 | ICE. And just to give people context, the last time we talked to swing voters, this was right after |
| 1:35.4 | the killing of Renee McLeod and the killing of Alex Pretty hadn't happened. So this is the first |
| 1:41.5 | time we've heard from voters after both those shootings in Minneapolis. |
| 1:45.4 | Mara, did you notice that there was a sort of difference in how the voters in Arizona talked about |
| 1:50.3 | this issue compared to Pennsylvania? So what really struck me was how these voters talked about |
| 1:57.2 | the chaos that ICE has called. One woman said, it's constant chaos in the world, |
| 2:02.1 | I want this all to stop. And there was a broad view that securing the border was a good thing, |
| 2:09.6 | not having undocumented immigrants with criminal records in the United States was a good thing, |
| 2:14.9 | but having ICE go out without uniforms, attacking American citizens |
... |
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