(TNND) — About a third of Americans want all immigrants living in the country illegally to be deported, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

Just over half of Republicans hold that view, as do 10% of Democrats.

A larger share of Americans, just over half, said some, but not all, undocumented immigrants should be deported.

And 16% said no immigrants should be deported.

“Immigration is a third rail of American politics,” said Ernesto Sagás, an expert in politics and U.S. immigration policies who teaches at Colorado State University.

And he said the varied responses in the Pew Research Center poll show the diversity of opinion within the electorate.

But there weren’t any big surprises in the new survey data, said Tony Payan, the director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“I think this is about where public opinion has been sitting for a while,” Payan said.

He said most people would like to see undocumented immigration end. He also said most Americans would also like to see more visa paths for legal immigration. And they’d like to see criminals prioritized for deportation.

Most Americans don’t see all undocumented immigrants as bad people, Payan said.

But Payan said American attitudes on immigration have shifted to the right over the last decade, coinciding with President Donald Trump’s emergence on the political stage.

“One of the great successes of the Trump rhetoric has been to move public opinion to the right,” Payan said. “But it's not that extreme.”

Overall, 51% of Americans told the Pew Research Center that “some” immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported.

About 40% of Republicans said “some” undocumented immigrants should be deported, while another 54% said “all” immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported.

A majority of Democrats, 61%, said “some” immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported. Another 10% of Democrats said “all” immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported.

There was nearly unanimous agreement that violent criminals living in the country illegally should be deported.

That view was held by 97% of Americans who support some deportations, with no separation between Republicans or Democrats.

About half of Americans support deporting undocumented immigrants who commit nonviolent crimes, with a noticeable partisan split on that question.

Over 40% supported deporting undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for less than four years.

But the survey showed very little support for deporting illegal immigrants who have a job and family here in the U.S.

Fourteen percent supported deporting undocumented immigrants who have U.S.-born children, just 9% supported deporting undocumented immigrants who came here as children themselves, and only 5% supported deporting undocumented immigrants married to American citizens.

“No one is going to come up to the defense of rapists and murderers,” Sagás said.

But he said the survey shows a “common sense approach to immigration” in which Americans don’t paint all undocumented immigrants with the same broad brush.

The Pew Research Center also asked Americans if immigration arrests should be allowed in churches, schools and hospitals.

Over 60% of Americans think all of those places should be off limits for immigration enforcement.

But the majority of Americans said it’s fair game for authorities to arrest undocumented immigrants at work, home or during protests.

Trump vowed stricter border security and a crackdown on illegal immigration while campaigning for the White House.

He seems to be making good on those promises in the early going of his second term, as authorities report a 94% drop in southern border encounters along with a sharp rise in immigration arrests within the country.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement nearly matched all of last year’s arrests in just the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, previously told The National News Desk’s Kristine Frazao that they’re going after illegally present immigrants with criminal backgrounds first.

But Homan has said any immigrant who isn’t authorized to be in the country is fair game to be arrested and deported.

ICE arrested 1,155 criminal gang members in Trump’s first 50 days. DHS said that’s almost two and a half times the number arrested during the same period a year ago.

Close to 40 known or suspected terrorists were arrested.

The National Sheriffs' Association applauded the crackdown.

“We as sheriffs think it's long overdue,” Sheriff Kieran Donahue, the NSA president, told TNND last month.

Payan said Tuesday that he didn’t think Trump had very strong opinions on immigration before he became a presidential candidate a decade ago.

“But I think that many of his collaborators are extreme restrictionists, and they certainly are way to the right of the general public opinion,” Payan said.

Sagás said Trump paints the issue of immigration with a broad brush focused on criminality and public safety.

But, Sagás said, undocumented immigrants aren’t all criminals.

Criminologist Alex Piquero said that despite concerns, the statistical evidence doesn’t show that immigrants cause more crime.

“Yeah, so, the evidence on that for over a dozen years is unequivocally clear that immigrants do not commit more crime than native-born Americans. That's true for serious crime, as well,” Piquero, a professor at the University of Miami and a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, told TNND last year.

Piquero said data collection has been limited, but the research has produced consistent results.

The FBI relies on crime data from thousands of police agencies across the country in order to publish national statistics, and most agencies don’t flag immigration status during an arrest.

Piquero and some colleagues turned to Texas several years back for some answers, as it’s one place where immigration status is recorded when people are arrested.

There, they found that American citizens were 1.19 times more likely to be arrested than immigrants, all else equal.

The same held true for violent crimes (citizens 1.18 times more likely to be arrested) and drug offenses (citizens 1.67 times more likely).