In the wake of the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal agents amid the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, voters’ support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spiking—including among President Donald Trump’s own party.

A new YouGov poll taken on Saturday, the day of Pretti’s fatal shooting, showed 19 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of American adults across the political spectrum voicing support for abolishing ICE.

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That marks a notable shift from when YouGov pollsters asked the same question last June, as Trump was ramping up his immigration crackdown. At that time only 9 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Americans overall backed abolishing ICE. Support for shuttering the agency has also surged among independents, with 47 percent backing its elimination in the Saturday poll compared to 25 percent in June.

Read More: What Minnesota Tells Us About America’s Future

Good and Pretti’s fatal shootings have heightened scrutiny of the aggressive tactics being used by federal immigration agents under Trump’s second Administration. Following Pretti’s killing, several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in calling for an investigation into the incident.

Other recent polls have shown support declining for how Trump is carrying out the mass deportation effort that he successfully campaigned on in 2024 as ICE’s operations in the interior U.S. come under fire.

A New York Times/Siena poll conducted from January 12 to 17, after Good’s killing on January 7, found that a majority of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of several issues—immigration included—and ​​49 percent said the country was worse off than a year ago, compared with 32 percent who said it was better off.

Regarding immigration specifically, 58 percent of respondents disapproved of how Trump was handling the issue, up from 52 percent in a previous Times/Siena poll conducted in September. A larger portion of around half of respondents backed the Administration’s deportation of illegal immigrants and the President’s handling of the U.S.’s southern border in the recent poll. But the reality of ICE’s enforcement tactics drew censure from most Americans: 61 percent—including 19 percent of Republicans, compared to 94 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents—said that ICE tactics had “gone too far.”

Trump attacked the Times/Siena poll on Truth Social the day it was released, calling the results “fake” and “heavily skewed toward Democrats.” (Among the registered voters who responded to the poll, 45 percent identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning compared to 44 percent who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning.)  In a separate post, he said that “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.” 

Yet, the poll is part of a larger trend of surveys that have documented growing disapproval of ICE’s tactics, especially after Good’s deadly shooting, which sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the country, and follows a longer decline in support for Trump’s handling of immigration.

A poll conducted for CNN by SSRS from January 9 to 12 found that 56 percent of respondents said that the shooting was an “inappropriate use of force” by federal officers, and 51 percent said that ICE enforcement actions were making cities less safe rather than safer. More than half of independent respondents were among those who said that ICE enforcement was making cities less safe. And while a majority of Republicans—56 percent—said the shooting represented an appropriate use of force, 21 percent said it was an inappropriate use of force, with 7 percent saying it was inappropriate but an isolated incident and 14 percent saying it was both inappropriate and reflected a bigger problem with ICE’s operations. 

Another survey, taken by Ipsos January 16 to 18, similarly found that 52 percent of Americans felt Good’s shooting marked an excessive use of force, including 19 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of independents.

And a separate poll by Quinnipiac conducted from January 8 to 12 found that 57 percent of registered voters disapproved of ICE’s handling of immigration enforcement, including 64 percent of  independents and 12 percent of Republicans.

Backing for Trump’s broader handling of immigration had also been falling for months even before the recent shootings, according to a number of polls. Recent approval numbers on the issue differ markedly from polling taken in the weeks after Trump took office last year. A Pew Research Center survey taken last February, for instance, found that 59 percent of U.S. adults said they approved of Trump increasing efforts to deport people. In December, in contrast, Pew found that 53 percent of Americans said he was doing “too much” to deport illegal immigrants, with that sentiment rising among both Democrat sand Republicans.

That approval of Trump’s immigration agenda was already waning by the spring and summer. An Ipsos poll from April 2025 found Americans slightly more disapproving (53 percent) than approving (46 percent) of his handling of immigration.

Senate Democrats said they would block a funding bill that includes tens of billions for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after federal agents fatally shot another person in Minneapolis on Saturday, a move that looks likely to cause a partial government shutdown at the end of the week.

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Reacting to a wave of anger from his party over the killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would oppose the package that includes $64.4 billion in funding for the DHS, $10 billion of which is earmarked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” Schumer, who represents New York, said on Saturday evening. He added that “because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Read more: Why Democrats Fought the ICE Funding Bill—and Why It Passed Anyway

The bill was passed in the House of Representatives on Thursday with few changes after seven Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to send the package to the Senate and keep the government open past Jan. 30.

Despite a growing national backlash over the actions of immigration agents in the wake of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, the seven Democrats—many of them in swing districts—backed the bill, citing the potential damaging effects of a shutdown.

Before the weekend, Schumer and other Senate Democrats had signaled that they had wanted to avoid a shutdown and the bill looked likely to pass in the Senate. But Pretti’s killing at the hands of a Border Patrol agent, after being pepper-sprayed and shot several times on the ground, prompted a wave of anger in the party.  

Republicans need seven Democratic votes to reach the 60 they need to pass the bill, but several Senate Democrats who previously voted with Republicans to avoid shutdowns, or had indicated they would support the legislation, said they would no longer vote for it.

“Enough is enough,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada who voted against her party to end the government shutdown in November last year. “I have the responsibility to hold the Trump administration accountable when I see abuses of power.”

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico used the same language in announcing his opposition to the bill. 

“Enough is enough. I will not vote to fund the lawlessness of DHS, not by itself and not packaged with other funding bills. We need MAJOR reforms at DHS, and we need them now,” he wrote on X.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington had argued in favor of the legislation before Saturday, but shifted her position after the shooting. 

“Federal agents cannot murder people in broad daylight and face zero consequences,” she wrote Saturday. “The DHS bill needs to be split off from the larger funding package before the Senate — Republicans must work with us to do that. I will continue fighting to rein in DHS and ICE.”

Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, another one of the eight Democrats who voted to end the shutdown in November, said she wouldn’t support the DHS measure.

“The Trump Administration and Kristi Noem are putting undertrained, combative federal agents on the streets with no accountability,” Cortez Masto said in a statement on social media. “This is clearly not about keeping Americans safe, it’s brutalizing U.S. citizens and law-abiding immigrants. I will not support the current Homeland Security funding bill.”

Read More: Photos of Minneapolis Protests As City Erupts in Anger Over Killing By Federal Agent

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, Peter Welch of Vermont, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and Brian Schatz of Hawaii all also vowed to vote no.

Independent Maine Sen. Angus King said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that he would not vote for an ICE package but that “we don’t have to have a shutdown.”

Schumer’s announcement came hours after authorities identified the person killed by federal authorities in Minneapolis as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, who wanted to “make a difference in this world,” according to his father. His killing marked the second by federal agents in just over two weeks, after Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three.

Senate Republicans are now scrambling to avoid a shutdown. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins told the New York Times she was “exploring all options.”

“We have five other bills that are really vital, and I’m relatively confident they would pass,” she said.

The bill covers around $1.3 trillion in annual spending, and its failure would mean some parts of the government would have to shut down.

Although the move marks a shift in the Democratic Party’s willingness to block funding for ICE, the agency is sitting on tens of billions of dollars from President Donald Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed last year—$14 billion of which was to be allocated to deportation efforts.

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More than 1 million people have been left without power and at least 13 people have died during a massive winter storm that has sown chaos across the South and the Midwest and is now barreling toward the East Coast.

Over 200 million people across the country were under some kind of weather alert as of Sunday morning. Power outages mostly affected homes in the South, including in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky, where large snowfall is rare. Parts of the U.S. experienced dangerously low wind chills in the minus-20s to minus-30s as Arctic air pushed south. Copenhagen, New York, saw record-breaking temperatures of -49°F, Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Sunday.

The storm’s dangerous mixture of heavy snow, sleet, ice, and bitter cold threatens to trap millions indoors for days. Travel has been severely disrupted, with more than 16,000 scheduled flights canceled from Saturday through Monday, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. On Sunday, around 11,000 flights were canceled—the most in a single day since the COVID-19 pandemic. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in the D.C. area canceled all flights on Sunday, and New York’s LaGuardia Airport has reopened after closing on Sunday afternoon, although no flights are expected to take off or land until Monday morning.

Read more: People Are Panic Buying for the Winter Storm. An Expert Explains Why We Do It

President Donald Trump described the storm as “historic” on Saturday and said he had approved federal disaster declarations for several states—including South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia. 

By late Saturday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 17 states and the District of Columbia had declared weather emergencies.

“We just ask that everyone would be smart – stay home if possible,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said.

By Sunday morning, the storm began to hit New England and much of the eastern third of the United States. The National Weather Service (NWS) expects up to 20 inches of snow across New England, while some places, including Boston, could see more. More than a dozen states have already seen more than a foot of snow, according to NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center. Bonito Lake in New Mexico saw 31 inches of snow, Crested Butte in Colorado saw 23 inches, and Clintonville in Pennsylvania saw 20. Extreme cold conditions are expected to linger for days.

Experts warn the storm could become particularly dangerous due to the freezing temperatures forecast to follow closely behind it. As snow turns to sleet and freezing rain, roads could be coated with ice, and powerlines could freeze.

“In the wake of the storm, communities from the Southern Plains to the Northeast will contend with bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills,” the NWS said in its early Sunday morning update. “This will cause prolonged hazardous travel and infrastructure impacts.”

At least 13 people across the country have died in possible connection to the storm. Two people died in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, one in Austin, Texas, one in Emporia, Kansas, one in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and three people died in Tennessee—one in Crockett, one in Haywood, and another in Obion. The causes of death in most cases are still under investigation.

At least five more people were found dead outside in New York City, according to local officials, as feels-like temperatures dropped into the negatives—a season low for the area—and local leaders called for residents to stay home and to take precautions. Warming centers opened across the five boroughs, and other city governments have listed local recreation centers and buildings to serve as heated shelters.

Zohran Mamdani, tackling his first major weather event as NYC Mayor, announced a remote learning day for the city’s schools “to keep everyone safe from hazardous weather conditions.”

“While we do not yet know their causes of death, there is no more powerful reminder of the dangers of the extreme cold, and how vulnerable how many of our neighbors are, especially homeless New Yorkers,” Mamdani said at a news conference on Sunday.

He added on social media that his teams were “scouring the streets, offering shelter to homeless New Yorkers, and helping bring people inside.”

From Atlanta to Washington D.C. to Boston, transit authorities spent much of the weekend before the storm salting roads, sidewalks, and routes, while urging residents to stay home Sunday.

Philadelphia’s public transit, the SEPTA, said in a news release that “it is possible that some services will be entirely suspended” as ice might impact infrastructure, while Atlanta’s MARTA said that the only bus routes available Sunday would be “lifeline routes” that provide direct service to medical facilities and emergency rooms.

—Miranda Jeyaretnam contributed reporting.

The man fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning has been identified as 37-year-old Alex Pretti.   

Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, the city where he lived. He was a keen outdoorsman and biked trails near his home. 

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Pretti’s father, Michael, said he wanted to “make a difference in this world.”

“Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital,” he said in a statement shared with several media outlets. 

“Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact,” he added. 

Multiple videos of Saturday’s shooting show Border Patrol agents spraying Pretti with a substance and pinning him to the ground before the shooting. Moments before the confronation, Pretti was attempting to help a woman protester who was being pushed by a federal agent.

Pretti’s family said he had been motivated to join the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the killing of another Minneapolis resident, 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, by a federal agent just over two weeks ago.

Read more: Federal Agents Kill Another Person in Minneapolis Immigration Crackdown

“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” Michael Pretti told the Associated Press. “He felt that doing the protesting was a way to express that, you know, his care for others.”

He said he had a conversation with his son earlier this month in which he told him to be careful while protesting.

“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”

At a news conference on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit to carry a firearm in public and only had a few parking tickets.

Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, a former colleague of Pretti’s at the VA Hospital, described him as “a kind person who lived to help.”

“He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together,” Drekonja said in a post on BlueSky. “Will never happen now,” he added. 

Born in Illinois, Pretti graduated from Preble High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 2006. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011, before attaining a nursing license. 

Pretti was devoted to his patients at the VA hospital. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents professional employees affiliated with the Minneapolis VA Hospital, said Pretti “dedicated his life to serving American veterans.”

“While details of the incident are still emerging, one fact is already clear: this tragedy did not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of an administration that has chosen reckless policy, inflammatory rhetoric, and manufactured crisis over responsible leadership and de-escalation,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

After watching coverage of the shooting on the news, Mac Randolph recognized Pretti as the man who cared for his father, Terry Randolph, during his final days in December 2024.

“He spent three, four days in the ICU and explained everything that would happen when they turned off the oxygen,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “He was as compassionate a person as you could be.”

After his father passed, Randolph said Pretti took his father, an Air Force veteran, on an “honorary walk” around the facility on his gurney, draped in an American flag.

“You could see that it wasn’t the first time he had done that,” he said.

Randolph said he felt compelled to share a video on social media in which Pretti reads a final tribute to his father, Terry, who passed away at 77-years-old.

“Today, we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti says in the video. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.”

As a potentially historic winter storm has already knocked out power to 112,000 homes and warnings are in place for some 140 million Americans, many in the storm’s path have rushed to stores to stock up on supplies.

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Images of shelves stripped bare at stores across the country have found their way to social media as the storm started to sweep its way east from Texas on Saturday morning, with freezing rain and snow reports in Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Read More: How to Prepare for a Winter Storm Power Outage

Images of Trader Joe’s stores in Washington, D.C., and Chelsea, New York City, show empty aisles. Meanwhile, further south, grocery stores in Charlotte, North Carolina, saw an influx of customers stocking up on water, non-perishable food items and canned goods, as well as batteries. Locals in the area reported that water was sold out at their Harris Teeter.

But are people right to stock up, or is this another case of unwarranted panic buying? And what is the difference between being prepared and being paranoid?

Hersh Shefrin, professor of behavioral finance at Santa Clara University, says that this phenomenon is not uncommon in the face of a major weather event or high-stress situation.

“It is certainly reasonable to stock up for a few days,” he says, but once the buying is driven by a “fight or flight” emotional response, that’s when it transforms into panic buying.

“There’s a difference between emergency preparedness and panic buying,” Shefrin tells TIME. “So I think that what we would like in an ideal world is that when there’s an impending storm, that people engage in reasonable, sensible emergency preparedness, but when fear takes over, then people become focused on worst-case scenarios.”

Panic buying can be heavily influenced by other people, he says. 

“When people start to panic buy, their impulses take over,” he continues. “So, if they’re in a shop and they see that there’s some item that wasn’t on their shopping list, but they just see that the stock of a certain item is going low, they [might] think, ‘Oh, I better get that before they’re all gone.’”

Shefrin says the best way to prevent actual shortages is for consumers to stop and not let their emotions take over.

Behavioral scientist Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale University, says that the “inherent uncertainty” of the storm’s severity this weekend leads people to try to control what they can.

“People tend to be overly risk-averse and have a desire for control rather than hysteria,” Dhar tells TIME. He says that the “risk of running out feels worse than overspending,” as people can rationalize to themselves that they need the goods later. 

“The salience in the media…and constant weather alerts on apps makes the event seem more scary psychologically,” he adds, arguing that people then react to emotions instead of the probabilities of harm, especially as the media continues to use words including “historic” to describe the storm.

Recent instances of panic buying include during the COVID-19 pandemic, and those stories of toilet paper shortages are still salient in Americans’ minds, Sherafin adds. In 2020, consumers also raced to stock up on cleaning products, disinfectants and hand sanitizers, as well as face masks.

A man was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, the second fatal shooting in just over two weeks by federal authorities in the city.

The incident follows the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good by a federal agent less than three miles away, and comes as the city was already convulsed by mass protests calling for an end to the surge of immigration agents in the state.

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The victim was named as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and intensive care unit nurse who treated veterans. His family said he was motivated to join protests after Good’s killing.

Several videos of the shooting show an altercation taking place around 9 am when a woman protester was pushed to the ground by a Border Patrol agent. When Pretti attempts to stand between the agent and the woman, the agent pepper-sprays him in the face. More agents join the fray and tackle Pretti to the ground as he is disoriented. As a group of agents restrain Pretti on the ground, one emerges from the melee with a gun, and soon after, a shot rings out, then several more in quick succession. At least 10 shots were fired in around five seconds, including several as Pretti lay motionless on the ground.

Read more: Minnesotans Shutter Businesses and Call Off Work in Economic Blackout Day to Protest ICE

President Donald Trump responded to the shooting in a lengthy post on Truth Social that called immigration agents “patriots” and claimed they were in Minneapolis because of “massive Monetary Fraud” and “Illegal Criminals that were allowed to infiltrate the State.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a press conference on Saturday afternoon that Pretti had not been in trouble with the police before.

“The only interaction that we are aware of with law enforcement has been for traffic tickets and we believe he is a lawfully gun owner with a permit to carry,” O’Hara said.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave a detailed account of the shooting in a statement that was contradicted by several videos shot by bystanders at the scene. The agency said it was carrying out a “targeted operation” when an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, pictures of which it shared with the media. It said officers attempted to disarm the man, but he “violently resisted.”

“Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene,” the statement continued. It added: “[T]his looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

But several videos showing the lead-up to the fatal shooting show Pretti filming a group of Border Patrol officers with his phone in his right hand, with his left hand empty. The video shows an agent pepper-spraying Pretti in the face and, together with several other officers, dragging him to the ground. That is when the fatal shooting occurs.

Read more: Fatal ICE Shooting Sparks Scrutiny of Killings in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

The incident is the latest in a series of shootings in which the DHS claims the victim was threatening the life of an agent, only for video evidence to later contradict the claim. After the shooting of Renee Good, the DHS accused her of “attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism,” only for video evidence to show her turning her car away, and the agent positioned to the side of her vehicle when he fired the fatal shot.

Several other federal officials gave accounts of events that were similarly inaccurate to those given by DHS.

Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, found out about the death of their son when they were called by an Associated Press reporter. As of Saturday evening, the family had still not heard from anyone at a federal law enforcement agency about their son’s death, according to the AP.

In a statement released to the media, the family criticised the “sickening lies told about our son by the administration.”

“Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed,” the statement said.

Saturday’s shooting prompted a wave of anger from local politicians, many of whom have been calling for the Trump Administration to bring an end to its immigration surge following weeks of violent encounters with Minnesotans, including the use of pepper spray and the arrest of peaceful protesters.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz described the shooting as “sickening” and called on President Trump to end his immigration crackdown in the state.

“I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening,” Walz said in a post on X.

“The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”

Later, he urged people protesting the shooting to do so peacefully.

“We want peace, they want chaos,” the governor said of the federal government. “We cannot and will not give them what they want.”

Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said: To the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress who have stood silent: Get ICE out of our state NOW.

O’Hara, in his press conference, called for greater discipline from the estimated 3,000 federal immigration agents in the city.

“Our demand today is for those federal agencies that are operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity and integrity that effective law enforcement in this country demands,” he said.

A few hundred protesters gathered at the scene of the shooting in south Minneapolis by noon, where they scuffled with federal agents who had blocked off the intersection. Protesters screamed “I smell Nazis” at the federal agents and shouted at them to “go home.”

The agents deployed tear gas and used pepper-spray as they fought running battles with protesters.

The shooting comes a day after thousands took to the streets across Minnesota on Friday, closing down businesses and calling out of work in a mass protest against the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown in the state.

The “Ice Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” demonstration, organized by community leaders, members of the clergy, and labor unions, called for a “no work, no school, no shopping” economic blackout.

Trump, in his Saturday afternoon post, accused Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Walz of “inciting Insurrection.”

“Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers? The Mayor and the Governor called them off? It is stated that many of these Police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do!” he wrote.

As night fell across Minneapolis, many residents set out candles in their windows to memorialize Pretti. Several vigils were held across the city. A New York Times reporter visited one at Painter Park, near Pretti’s home, where more than 100 people gathered with candles and sang the opening lines to ‘This Little Light of Mine.’

When President Donald Trump unveiled his vast tariff regime targeting imports from almost every country in the world last year, he promised foreign countries would pay the levies and that Americans would reap the rewards. 

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But a new study published Monday by researchers at the Kiel Institute, an independent economic research institute based in Germany, found that American consumers and importers are paying for the tariffs by an overwhelming margin.

“Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden—the remaining 96% is passed through to U.S. buyers,” the authors of the research wrote in a study, which analyzed $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025.

Read More: How Trump’s Foreign Policy Gambits Are Reshaping the World

The research found that exporters to the U.S. raised prices to account for the tariffs, or kept prices the same while reducing shipments.

The study concludes that the $200 billion increase in customs revenue that the U.S. government raised in 2025 was a “tax paid almost entirely by Americans.”

Trump unveiled his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, a signature economic policy that defined his first year in office, on April 2, 2025. The tariffs included a baseline 10% tariff on almost all imports, higher country-specific rates for many trading partners, and additional sector-specific tariffs on autos, steel, and aluminum. Several sporadic tariff announcements followed over the year.

Read more: Trump, Tariffs, and the Rewiring of the American Empire

Researchers at the Kiel Institute specifically examined Brazil and India, both of which faced sharp tariff increases in August 2025, and in both cases, exporters did not “eat” the tariffs—a claim Trump often made. The researchers argued that this could be because exporters found competitive markets elsewhere, or because they “believe tariffs may be temporary or subject to negotiation,” in which case they’d have less incentive to cut costs to maintain volume.

In the immediate future, it said consumers are the “ultimate bearers of the burden.”

“Whether through higher prices on imported goods, higher prices on domestically produced goods that use imported inputs, or reduced availability and variety of products, American households pay for the tariffs,” the study found.

This corroborates findings from other think tanks and institutes that have tracked corporate activity since the tariffs dropped. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), in disclosures at the end of 2025, “industry executives have publicly told investors they are protecting profits by passing the costs of tariffs on to consumers.”

Other researchers at the Harvard Business School, the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, and the Brookings Institution have also argued that consumers are most affected by tariffs.

Trump has given varied justifications for the use of tariffs in his second term—both as an economic measure and a foreign policy tool. Over the weekend, Trump announced new tariffs on European allies who sent troops to Greenland after Trump threatened to annex the island.

“Starting on February 1st, 2026, all of the above mentioned Countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland), will be charged a 10% Tariff on any and all goods sent to the United States of America,” he said on Truth Social on Jan. 17, adding that these tariffs would increase to 25% on June 1, and would remain in effect “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The Supreme Court is set to release a much-anticipated ruling on the legality of Trump’s tariffs in the coming weeks. Two lower courts have already found that Trump overstepped his authority by imposing tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).