Nearly 10 months after Democrats demanded records of ICE’s plans for deploying agents to polling places, the agency has turned over 576 pages of press clippings.
The batch of useless — and already easily accessible — documents produced by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee represents the agency’s efforts to comply with an order issued by Judge Beryl A Howell last month to produce 1,000 pages per month.
By handing over a stack of press clippings compiled for the Department of Homeland Security’s “daily briefing,” ICE “has circumvented the court’s orders” and is hiding its plans from the public, the DNC argued in a joint status report submitted to the court late on Friday.
The DNC noted that its FOIA request specifically asks ICE to exclude stand-alone news articles and press clippings that don’t contain discussion by agency officials.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Vaden told the court in response that he was calling “ICE’s attention to the proviso,” but he rejected the DNC’s charge that the agency is “queuing… nonresponsive documents before responsive ones” to hide its plans.
ICE did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment for this story.
ICE has repeatedly frustrated efforts to uncover internal discussions, despite public statements by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that they are open to deploying agents to polling places. A statement by Homeland Security to Raw Story last month went even further by saying the government wouldn’t rule out arrests at polling places in response to “an active public safety threat.”
The hundreds of pages of press clippings delivered by ICE as its first batch of documents produced in response to the DNC request came after the agency gave itself an extra week to meet the monthly quota set by Howell.
Noting that the agency had not produced “a single page of responsive materials” in response to the DNC’s October 2025 request despite the fact that the 2026 midterms were less than four months away, Howell’s July 13 order directed ICE “to immediately begin processing” responsive materials “at a rate of at least 1,000 pages per month, including the month of July.”
The government informed the court last month that ICE was setting Aug. 7 as a deadline “so as to include a greater number of responsive, non-exempt records” in its first production.
The flood of useless documents also comes after ICE initially told the DNC in early June that it had zero responsive records, prompting the Democrats to accuse the agency of “a remarkable lack of diligence.” In response, the DNC flagged news reports about the presence of ICE agents at polling places in Texas and California during primary elections in those states in May and June, respectively, along with Mullin’s testimony during his Senate confirmation hearing.
“Shockingly, ICE agents also entered an active polling place in New York to confront a poll worker over a month-old Instagram post addressing the killing of Renee Good,” DNC lawyers said in a filing calling the government’s bluff.