Election Officials Are Getting Ready for ICE to Show Up at the Polls

Last week, as President Donald Trump prepared to leave the White House on his way to China for a state visit, he was asked if he would be willing to deploy troops from the Guard or agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to polling locations during November’s midterms. “I would do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump responded. Trump’s comments are the latest in a litany of confusing and sometimes contradictory statements from his administration about the possibility of deploying federal agents to oversee the elections. It’s already had a chilling effect on voters and election workers. WIRED spoke to more than a dozen election officials, including secretaries of state and election directors in red and blue states, about the possibility of an ICE deployment to polling locations in November. While some officials say they are not worried, the majority said they had major concerns, especially as these statements come during a much broader attack on elections and democracy from the Trump administration. At least one has actively planned for a scenario in which he’s arrested. With six months to go before the midterms, the officials said they are now scrambling to reassure voters, replace federal election resources eliminated by Trump, and try to plan for scenarios they have never had to contemplate before. “The state of things is completely different than it has been in any federal election that I've been a part of,” one election director from a western state who requested anonymity to speak openly tells WIRED. “I've been doing this for 21 years now, and this is the first time we've had to start to prepare for, or at least respond to, public questions about federal interference. It's ratcheted up to a whole new level now where there is a possibility [ICE is] going to be at polling places.” Got a Tip? Are you an election worker with insight into what's happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact David Gilbert at [email protected] or securely on Signal on DavidGilbert.01. These concerns first began when the Trump administration launched mass deployments of ICE agents to cities like Chicago and Minneapolis. Election officials across the country became concerned that those same agents could show up at polling locations. Prominent figures on the right boosted the idea: “We're going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” former White House adviser Steve Bannon told his podcast listeners on February 3, a day after Trump called to “nationalize” elections. “You can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.” The call for ICE to be deployed to polling locations is rooted in large part in the baseless conspiracy theory that noncitizens vote in huge numbers, even though noncitizen voting accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of a percent of votes cast during US elections. When asked about Bannon’s claims two days later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to rule out the possibility. She said that while she hadn’t heard the president discussing “formal plans” to deploy ICE to polling locations, she added, “I can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November.” While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) later ruled out the possibility that ICE would be deployed to the polls while on a call with scores of election officials, on March 18, the new Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin refused to rule out the possibility during his confirmation hearing, saying he doesn’t “understand what the concern about enforcing immigration at polling places is anyways because … there shouldn’t be any illegals at the polling spot.”