Fox News has repeatedly misled its viewers about public support for so-called sanctuary laws in California and elsewhere in recent weeks. The network is presenting outdated surveys as the latest sample of public opinion and ignoring more recent polls that tend to show majority support for such policies, especially in California.
On March 8, Ingraham Angle host Laura Ingraham said that a UC Berkeley poll “just found that 74 percent of Californians wanted to end sanctuary cities, including 65 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of Democrats.” The Five co-host Jesse Watters repeated this survey’s findings on March 14, emphasizing that it had been conducted by co-host Greg Gutfeld’s alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, “so we know it's correct.” And on March 20, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, without even citing a specific poll, declared: “And by the way, most Americans don't want sanctuary states or sanctuary cities. If they -- any polling reveals that.”
In fact, the U.C. Berkeley survey cited by Ingraham and Watters and presented by Ingraham as brand new was conducted in August 2015, as noted in the show’s on-screen graphic.
In January, PolitiFact found that the Berkeley poll was outdated and didn't match up with more recent polling after a California Republican lawmaker cited it in an appearance on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. PolitiFact cited four more recent polls, all conducted in 2017, most of which found majority support for California’s sanctuary laws or sanctuary city policies in general. Furthermore, the same Berkeley polling institute whose 2015 survey was cited by Fox actually found more recently in March 2017 that 56 percent of respondents supported “local communities declaring themselves sanctuary cities” (with the question phrased differently, 53 percent objected to those cities ignoring detention request from immigration authorities).
Polling results on support for sanctuary policies seems to vary greatly depending on the wording of the question asked. In March 2017, a fact-checker at The Washington Post examined claims by Trump administration officials that a vast majority of Americans opposed sanctuary cities. While the Post piece noted that “there’s not a lot of research on public opinion of sanctuary cities,” it also found that the phrasing of survey questions can impact outcomes and that other polls show more people support sanctuary cities than oppose them. PolitiFact came to the same conclusion, explaining that the question that those on the “political right” interpreted as a reference to sanctuary cities did not fully capture the nuance of the policy, potentially impacting the response.
Notably, that March 2017 Fact Checker article from the Post also reported on more recent polls than the one cited by Fox hosts of late, finding support for sanctuary policies. One of those was a March 2017 poll conducted by Fox News that found 53 percent of registered voters opposed taking away federal funds from sanctuary cities.