On September 1, a reporter in New York asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin if ICE officers could show up at polling places this November. And his answer was another example of 21st-century demagoguery.

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” Mullin told reporters. “We’re there to enforce specific threats.” Pressed further, he narrowed the possibilities. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. ICE’s job, he added, is immigration and customs enforcement. And “if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”

The Department of Homeland Security backed him up in a statement to Politico, saying ICE “is not planning operations targeting polling locations.” However, “if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.” CNN later reported that a DHS spokesperson added certain officers, “if called upon” by local law enforcement, could be positioned to “rapidly respond to an incident if necessary.”

According to Joe Kwon, a business immigration attorney in Nashville who advised mitú, there’s a fine line in the argument. “The accurate frame is DHS won’t rule it out, not ICE is being deployed,” Kwon said. “That’s still a story. It’s just a more defensible one.” Kwon also noted that, according to DHS, ICE officers have received no special election-day guidance.

The Federal Law That’s Supposed to Keep Armed Agents Away

Whatever way the government wants to frame its threats, the law is clear. Title 18, Section 592 of the U.S. Code bars any federal officer from bringing or keeping “troops or armed men” at a place where a general or special election is held. The only exception is for repelling “armed enemies of the United States.” Both Kwon and Angelo Kevin Brown, a criminologist who studies policing and federal law enforcement, independently told mitú that violating the statute carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and disqualification from holding federal office.

David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, told CNN, “I hope someone in his office has made him aware of 18 U.S.C. § 592. That is illegal, and anyone who orders anyone to do that is committing a federal crime.”

That statute is not the only one standing in the way. Brown pointed mitú to several others: 18 U.S.C. § 594 and 52 U.S.C. § 10307(b), both of which criminalize voter intimidation, the National Voter Registration Act’s criminal penalties provision at 52 U.S.C. § 20511, and 18 U.S.C. § 241, which makes it a federal crime to conspire to intimidate someone out of exercising a constitutional right, voting included.

Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out sending federal officers or troops to the polls. He often told reporters this year he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.” Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, has spent much of the year claiming ICE will “surround the polls” to prevent what he calls “another stolen election.”

And the underlying premise driving much of this, that noncitizen voting is a widespread problem, keeps falling apart under scrutiny. DHS officials once claimed as many as 16,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada. Records later obtained by the Guardian showed the agency could only confirm 185.

Denver and Civil Rights Groups Are Already Suing Over It

On Thursday, the city of Denver and a coalition of civil rights groups filed a preemptive lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C. They are asking a judge to declare any plan to station armed agents at polling places unlawful. The legal group Democracy Forward filed the suit on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause, UnidosUS, and the city of Denver, naming the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Mullin, and ICE’s David Venturella as defendants. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan.

“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” the lawsuit reads. It goes on to argue that such a presence would leave voters afraid of confronting armed federal agents simply for showing up to cast a ballot. Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement, “Putting armed officers in polling places is a tactic used by dictators. But we won’t be scared out of exercising our rights. No American should ever have to walk past armed federal law enforcement just to cast a ballot. Yet, this administration has adopted a policy that allows exactly that.”

For its part, the Justice Department is separately sending its own election monitors to polling sites this cycle. It sent dozens during the primaries and reportedly plans to send up to a thousand more for November.

Could ICE Actually Pull Off a Polling Place Sweep?

Here, common sense is, once again, our biggest ally. The United States had 95,815 polling locations for the 2024 election, according to federal Election Assistance Commission data cited by the Democracy Project. ICE, even counting a recent 120 percent hiring surge, has roughly 22,000 agents. If the agency tried to station a single agent at every polling site in the country, with no other assignments, it would cover about a quarter of them.

Add duration to the equation. Polls in states like Arizona, California, and Virginia stay open 13 hours on Election Day. And early voting in many states runs for weeks before that, not hours. Arizona’s in-person early voting window alone opens 27 days before the election. Covering that would require sustained, month-long deployment, not a single-day operation.

Similarly, in the 2024 election, only 37.4 percent of Americans voted in person on Election Day itself, according to Election Assistance Commission data. Another 35.2 percent voted early in person. And 30.3 percent voted by mail, patterns that are even more lopsided in states like California and Arizona. Naturalized citizens, the population most likely to fear ICE at a polling place, voted by mail at a rate nearly eight points higher than native-born citizens in 2024. If ICE did show up on Election Day in large numbers, the analysis suggests, agents would disproportionately encounter native-born, and often Republican, voters instead.

Why the Fear Might Matter More Than the Feasibility

We are, by no means, invalidating the fear. On the contrary, we know information is power. So, think about this: ICE agents have already shown up near voting locations this year without a coordinated national operation behind it. During Texas’s primary, nine ICE agents filled the parking lot of a Bexar County voting location until the county sheriff arrived and told them to leave. A similar scene played out outside a voting location in Simi Valley, California.

Juan Carlos Rivera, a Miami-based immigration attorney whose practice includes removal defense, told mitú the distinction DHS is drawing between targeted enforcement and general patrol will not register with most people walking into a polling place in a mixed-status community. “Even if DHS describes these operations as ‘targeted’ rather than general enforcement, that distinction will mean very little to many people walking into a polling place in a mixed-status community,” Rivera said. “Telling those voters that ICE might be present because agents are executing a warrant does not make the presence less intimidating. It confirms that immigration enforcement can enter a space associated with voting.”

ProPublica has documented more than 170 U.S. citizens detained by ICE officers, in many cases assaulted, tased, or shot, and a December 2025 report found Latinos are disproportionately targeted in ICE operations in New York.

Furthermore, Rivera was careful to add, “Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections,” he said. “This is not about encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote. It is about protecting the ability of American citizens to vote without immigration enforcement being used, intentionally or otherwise, as a source of fear.”

What Citizens Should Know Before They Vote

If you are a citizen, every expert mitú spoke with said the same thing first: vote. Voter intimidation is itself a federal crime under 52 U.S.C. § 10307(b). And the right to cast a ballot without confronting armed officers does not disappear because DHS has left a narrow exception open.

Rivera recommends confirming your registration and ID requirements with your state or local election authority before Election Day. And, where available, choosing early in-person voting or voting by mail instead of showing up on Election Day. For his part, Kwon added a smaller but specific piece of advice for citizens in mixed-status families: bring whatever identification your state requires. And leave a relative’s immigration paperwork at home. There is no reason to carry it to a polling place.

What to Do if You See ICE at a Polling Place

Rivera’s advice is very specific: Stay calm. Do not run, physically resist, interfere with officers, provide false information, or present false documents. If an agent approaches you, you can ask, “Am I free to leave?” If the answer is yes, leave calmly. If you are being detained, you can state that you are exercising your right to remain silent and that you want to speak with an attorney before answering questions. You should not sign any immigration document you do not understand without first consulting one. If you believe immigration enforcement activity is interfering with your ability to vote, notify a poll worker or election official, and document what happened once it is safe to do so.

Brown added that anyone who experiences harassment at a polling site, including from someone falsely posing as a federal agent, should contact the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, specifically its Voting Section. He also flagged that Indigenous voters, including Native Americans presenting valid tribal identification, have in some cases been wrongly harassed or detained by ICE agents who did not recognize tribal ID as legitimate, despite it being legally valid.

What Immigration Attorneys Want Green Card Holders to Know

The most useful thing either attorney offered mitú was not about polling places at all. “The thing most likely to cost somebody their status this November isn’t an agent at a polling place. It’s a voter registration form,” Kwon said. He warns a lawful permanent resident who checks “U.S. citizen” during a DMV transaction has, under immigration law, made a false claim to citizenship. That falls under INA 212(a)(6)©(ii), one of the few grounds in immigration law with essentially no waiver for someone later seeking a green card. “Fifteen years of lawful status can come apart over a checkbox nobody read carefully,” Kwon said.

He said the risk became real in August 2025. Back then, USCIS committed in writing to issuing Notices to Appear in these cases. Once removal proceedings open, 8 U.S.C. § 1429 bars USCIS from even considering a pending naturalization application. “The citizenship case doesn’t get denied,” Kwon said. “It gets frozen.”

“I’d be doing your readers real harm if I helped anyone who isn’t a citizen figure out how to vote safely,” Kwon said. “There is no safe version of that.” After all, voting as a noncitizen is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 611. And it permanently closes off most lawful immigration paths. “The safest thing a non-citizen can do this November is stay off the rolls. And check whether they’re already on them by accident,” Kwon said.

On the other hand, anyone on a green card, work visa, DACA, or TPS who has renewed a driver’s license in the past few years can request their own voter registration record from their county election office, usually for free and within minutes. If something turns up that should not be there, Kwon said that is a conversation to have with an immigration attorney before touching it, not after.

Rivera echoed the same warning for noncitizen family members. They should not attempt to vote, sign any document claiming U.S. citizenship, or help complete paperwork they do not fully understand, since doing so can trigger immigration and criminal consequences that are difficult to undo.

Tags: Ice, Midterms, vote