A group of voting rights advocates and a Democratic-led city moved Thursday to get ahead of a potential Election Day clash, filing a lawsuit aimed at stopping the Trump administration from sending armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to polling locations before November’s midterm elections.
Filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., the complaint asks a judge to rule that any plan to station armed agents at voting sites would be illegal. It also seeks an order barring federal officers from carrying weapons near polling places or locations where ballots are collected.
“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” the lawsuit stated. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal law enforcement if they choose to cast a ballot.”
The legal action names the Department of Homeland Security and ICE as defendants, along with their leaders, Markwayne Mullin and David Venturella. Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal organization, brought the case on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause, UnidosUS and the city of Denver.
At the center of the challenge is a federal statute that makes it a crime for officials to direct or authorize the use of “any troops or armed men” at “any place where a general or special election is held,” except in cases where such force is necessary to repel “armed enemies of the United States.”
The lawsuit comes after some prominent MAGA voices, including Steve Bannon, urged ICE to “surround the polls.” Trump administration officials have said there are no firm plans for that kind of deployment, though they have also stopped short of fully excluding the possibility that agents could appear at polling sites in certain situations.
Speaking at a New York City news conference earlier this month, DHS Secretary Mullin said that “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places.”
Still, Mullin added that ICE agents could be present near voting locations if there were “a threat” to those sites or if officers were executing a warrant for someone they had “been actively tracking down.”
“If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be,” Mullin said when pressed again on the issue.
ICE’s deportation branch is mainly in charge of locating, arresting, detaining and deporting people who entered the U.S. illegally or otherwise violated federal immigration law. Its Homeland Security Investigations branch has historically focused on dismantling criminal activity with an international nexus, but has increasingly been assigned to help with immigration enforcement and investigations into alleged voter fraud.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the military has no plans to dispatch troops or National Guard soldiers to polling places.
