Just 39 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, latest Reuters/Ipsos poll says.

United States President Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dropped to a record low amid growing backlash over two fatal shootings linked to his crackdown on migrants, a new survey shows. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Monday, just 39 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s handling of immigration, compared with 41 percent earlier this month. The poll, conducted between Friday and Sunday, comes amid an outcry over a US border agent’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, over the weekend. Pretti was the second person to be killed by a federal agent in the city in less than a month, following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, on January 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

Facing growing backlash, Trump said on Monday that he would send his border tsar, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis and struck a positive tone on his administration’s relations with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, following what he described as “a very good” telephone conversation between the two men.In the new poll, 58 percent of respondents said US Immigration and Customs agents had gone “too far” in their crackdown on unauthorised migration, compared with 26 percent who said their actions were “about right” and 12 percent who said they did not go far enough. The polling mirrors the findings of several opinion surveys carried out before Pretti’s killing. In a poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena University and released on Friday, 61 percent of respondents said ICE’s tactics had gone too far, compared with 26 percent who said they were “about right” and 11 percent who believed they did not go far enough. A Wall Street Journal poll on January 16 found 58 percent of respondents said the Trump administration’s efforts to deport unauthorised migrants had gone too far, versus 46 percent who said they were about right or did not go far enough.

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Canadian PM Carney unveils multibillion-dollar push to lower food costs

Carney has been under pressure from the opposition to lower prices of food and other essentials for lower-income people.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a multibillion-dollar package as part of a series of measures aimed at lowering the costs of food and other essentials for low-income families. On Monday, Carney announced a five-year 25 percent boost to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) credit that starts this year. The GST credit, which is being renamed the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, will provide additional, significant support for more than 12 million Canadians, Carney said in a statement. The government will also provide a one-time top-up equivalent to a 50 percent increase this year to eligible residents. “We’re bringing in new measures to lower costs and make sure Canadians have the support they need now,” Carney said.

The measures would cost the government 3.1 billion Canadian dollars ($2.26bn) in the first year and between 1.3 billion Canadian dollars ($950m) and 1.8 billion Canadian dollars ($1.3bn) in each of the following four years, he told reporters at a news conference, according to the Reuters news agency. While overall consumer price inflation in Canada has eased and came in at 2.4 percent for December, “food price inflation remains high due to global and domestic factors, including supply chain disruptions, higher US tariffs from the trade war and climate change/extreme weather”, Tony Stillo, director of Canada Economics at Oxford Economics, told Al Jazeera. The government is also setting aside 500 million Canadian dollars ($365m) from the Strategic Response Fund to help businesses address the costs of supply chain disruptions without passing those costs on to Canadians, and will create a 150 million Canadian dollar ($110m) Food Security Fund under the existing Regional Tariff Response Initiative for small and medium enterprises and the organisations that support them.