Ben Affleck needed folks to watch his new Netflix movie.
So he sat down for a friendly podcast plug and wandered straight off the script.
And what he said about Trump voters gives away the whole game Democrats plan to run at the border.
Ben Affleck Turned a Movie Plug Into a Lecture on Trump Voters
Affleck directs and stars in Animals, a Netflix thriller about a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose young son vanishes in a kidnapping plot. Illegal aliens in Los Angeles sit at the center of the story, and Affleck made sure nobody missed the message.
He went on The Moment Podcast to sell it. Somewhere between talking up the cast and the plot, he decided to diagnose the tens of millions of Americans who back President Trump’s deportation push.
His diagnosis? Xenophobia.
Affleck told the host that “xenophobia and anti-immigration policies have been a part of the history of the United States for a very long time.” He reached back to the Boston of his childhood, where, as he tells it, each new wave of newcomers wanted to shut the door on the next one. The Irish didn’t want the Italians. The Italians didn’t want the Portuguese. On and on.
It’s a tidy little story. It also has nothing to do with a man who crossed the Rio Grande without permission last spring.
But Affleck did give an inch, and it was a revealing inch. He admitted that plenty of Latinos voted for Trump’s immigration policies, and he even conceded that “nobody wants to see somebody cut the line, right?”
That’s about as close as a Hollywood liberal gets to common sense. He couldn’t stay there long. In the very next breath, he accused politicians of “taking advantage a little bit of that resentment,” as if wanting the law enforced were some kind of grudge to be managed.
Then came the strawman. Affleck took comfort, he said, in his belief that most Americans “don’t believe that every immigrant is a criminal, a rapist.” Nobody in the Trump administration says that. Nobody at a Trump rally says that. ICE goes after people who broke the law to get here, and it puts the violent criminals at the front of the line.
The Polling Doesn’t Live in the Hollywood Hills
Affleck painted a country that looked at Trump’s enforcement push and recoiled. He said “you saw a lot of people recoil in horror” at how the administration carried it out.
The voters tell a different story. A Harvard/Harris survey conducted in May 2026 found 80% of voters supported deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes. Even 71% of Democrats signed on. And 56% backed deporting anyone in the country illegally, period.
That isn’t a fringe. That’s a landslide, and a bipartisan one at that.
But the line that ought to stop folks cold came next. Affleck insisted that “nobody wants, you know, criminals or rapists, but the idea that like somehow those people were being ignored previously is totally false.”
Totally false? Sanctuary cities and states across the country have spent years refusing to honor ICE detainers, the requests federal agents send to local jails asking them to hold a criminal illegal alien long enough for a handoff. Those jurisdictions open the cell door and let the man walk out onto the street instead. Democrat governors and mayors defend those policies out loud. They brag about them.
And the public isn’t buying it. Polling the White House touted earlier this year showed 67% of Americans want local jails to hand criminal illegal aliens over to federal authorities for deportation. Two out of three. Affleck might want to ask his neighbors in Los Angeles how they’d vote on that one.
He wasn’t finished, either. Affleck called the whole deportation debate “a veneer” that gives “a more polite presented voice to one of our more base ugly tendencies.” He wrapped up by calling the opposing view “repellent and a lie.”
So the grandmother in Tennessee who wants the drunk driver deported after his third arrest is hiding her base, ugly tendencies behind a veneer. Got it.
Ben Affleck Is Reading From the Same Script as the Abolish ICE Crowd
It would be easy to laugh this off as one more movie star in a cardigan lecturing flyover country. Hollywood does that every awards season. The ratings and the box office keep sending the same reply, and the stars keep not hearing it.
Even the movie itself didn’t escape. The hosts of The Ringer’s The Big Picture, hardly a MAGA outfit, devoted a chunk of their show to where Animals went off the rails.
But Affleck’s lines matter for a bigger reason. They match, almost beat for beat, what the Democrat Party now says about immigration enforcement.
At a DNC meeting in Austin, Texas, party members approved dueling messages, one to reform ICE and one to abolish it outright. DNC Chairman Ken Martin told reporters that “the one thing that unites Democrats” is the belief that what ICE is doing right now “should stop.”
Read that again. Not reform. Stop.
A YouGov survey released this spring found 77% of Democrats at least somewhat supportive of the abolish ICE movement. Socialist candidates have made it their rallying cry. Melat Kiros, running for Congress in Colorado, told NPR, “I think abolishing ICE is certainly going to be the one that is really galvanizing a lot of folks.”
And here’s where Affleck’s podcast detour stops being a celebrity sideshow. Once a party convinces its base that enforcement itself is bigotry, every tool of enforcement becomes illegitimate. Detainers. Deportations. Border agents. Walls. If wanting the line respected is just “resentment,” then nobody needs a line at all.
Americans already ran this experiment once. Under Joe Biden, Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 2 million encounters at the southern border in a single fiscal year, and then did it again the next year. Democrats called that compassion, right up until migrant buses started pulling into Chicago and New York City and their own mayors started begging Washington for help.
Maybe that’s too neat a line to draw from a movie promotion. Affleck didn’t say “open the border.” He didn’t need to. He told an audience that the voters who want the law enforced are acting on their ugliest instincts, and he called the case for enforcement a lie. A party that believes that won’t run a tight border the next time it holds the keys.
There’s a personal side to all this, and it’s worth being fair about. Affleck told Remezcla he lived in Mexico for a year as a 13-year-old and still feels real affection for the country. Plenty of Americans love Mexico. Plenty of them vacation there, marry there, retire there.
But loving Mexico and demanding that the United States enforce its own laws aren’t opposites. Most of the 80% in that Harvard/Harris poll would probably say the same.
The next fight is already teed up. Democrats who start with abolishing ICE rarely stop there, and amnesty talk follows close behind. The only question is how many more Hollywood stars line up to call it compassion.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Watch: Ben Affleck Says Being in Favor of Deporting Illegal Aliens Is Rooted in ‘Xenophobia’”; Harvard/Harris poll as reported by the New York Post via HarrisX; Power Line, “Adios!”; The White House, “Americans Overwhelmingly Support Deporting Criminal Illegals, Local Cooperation with ICE”; Associated Press via WSOC-TV, “Democrats disagree over abolishing or reforming ICE at DNC meeting”; NPR, “As some Democrats embrace calls to ‘abolish ICE,’ others seek more targeted reforms”; Ground News summary of Washington Times reporting on ICE and YouGov polling; Remezcla, “INTERVIEW: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington & Steven Yeun on ‘Animals’ & Connection to Mexico”; The Ringer, The Big Picture podcast episode on Animals; US Customs and Border Protection southwest border encounter data.