Houston, TX — US Special Agent Nicolas Little’s job is to protect America’s foreign embassies from terrorist attacks. He sports a heavy bulletproof vest, a lawman’s badge — and a gun he carries everywhere.
Everywhere but a voting booth.
Little told Raw Story he never imagined that the President of the United States could order his fellow federal agents into Texas polling stations on Election Day — but that's what he tried to do.
Little will have none of it. In his capacity as the Chairman of the Justice Committee of the Houston NAACP, he has filed suit in federal court to block this unprecedented invasion of agents into the election process. The invasion was ordered by Donald Trump’s Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Blanche announced the Department of Justice will send 1,000 extra monitors — including agents from the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to today's midterms, though he claimed reports that they will bearmed are "completely false."
Though federal agents generally carry guns, it has been illegal since the civil war to station armed agents at polls unless they are investigating or preventing federal crime.
But that is exactly the claim of the Justice Department — that they are on the hunt for voters and poll workers committing the federal crime of allowing aliens and other illegal voters to cast ballots.
Indeed, the US Attorney for Southern Texas Aaron Reitz says he’s energetically following Blanche’s order regarding helping illegal voters: “If you violate federal election law, I will hunt you down and prosecute you.”
Little, who was in court for the NAACP by zoom on Monday, heard the Department of Justice's no-guns promise — and the caveats. Guns or not, Little told Raw Story, “the fact that these ‘monitors’ will not be armed still creates an atmosphere of intimidation especially given the recent events in our communities involving federal officers.”
In San Antonio, we spoke with Lydia Camarillo, President of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), a group known for its non-partisan Latino Mobilization. She is concerned about the fear factor in this down-to-the-wire Senate race. The word is getting around that the massing of federal agents. That, by itself will scare away voters whether the feds brandish their weapons or not, she said.
To Little, this show of federal force looks a lot like intimidation of the voters — and smells a bit too much like Jim Crow and José Crow.
“I'm pretty sure that these poll monitors that would be deputized, they're not going to be pulling aside Anglo-Saxon or white people or people of European descent. It's definitely going to be Black and Brown people.”
He’s afraid they’ll besending hostile, untrained, guys looking for a fight.
Blanche and Trump have made it clear their targets are the thousands — they claim hundreds of thousands — of Mexican and other aliens that they claim Democratic counties are allowing, if not encouraging, to register and vote illegally.
There has been no evidence suggesting these claims are true.
As Trump told a Dallas crowd this year, “If the radical left Democrats and communists win this election,…they're going to defund the police, giving voting rights and welfare to 25 million illegal aliens.”
Agent Little, who served in the military for 10 years, including in Afghanistan, is stunned that his government would invade Texas.
“These type of tactics are things that I've seen when I was in a combat zone where people with scarves and their faces covered, kidnapping people. What is this, Russia?”
On Friday, Raw Story joined Little at an early voting station in downtown Houston. Cars packed the lot and the line for voters stretched down the sidewalk. Houston is Democratic Blue territory and the big, noisy turnout felt more like a block party than a civic exercise.
Crossing the Orange Line
Little pointed out an orange line spray-painted in the parking lot by poll workers, marking 100 feet from the poll’s doors. Even a federal agent like Little cannot and will not go over that line into the polling station.
What if the feds crossed the line, literally? Little’s answer is by the book. “That would be a problem, because that would be a direct violation of the law. The law does not allow deputized agents to enter a polling location. They violated the law as soon as they step across that line with any intent to go in after anyone.”
Little reminds us that in the 1960s, after passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department did send monitors to Texas to protect non-white voters. “What's different about Trump that's different from Lyndon Johnson sending in monitors; there's a difference between sending in monitors to protect people's right to vote versus sending in monitors to antagonize people's right to vote.”
Houston, with the largest Black population of any city in America plus a huge Hispanic citizenry, could be US Senate candidate James Talarico’s ticket to victory.
Tamaro Bell, a Black commentator on the local Fox channel, has no doubt that the government’s announcement of a posse of federal monitors will scare away Hispanic voters. The state’s GOP legislature has already imposed an obstacle course of State laws which have suppressed the Houston vote.
Bell, who was holding court at the poll party, is furious over the obstacle course of voting impediments unique to Texas. “They're doing their best to obliterate voting rights.”
Texas blocks most on-line registrations and prohibits voter drives unless conducted by special deputized registrars. And no one under 55 can get a mail-in ballot without a paid airplane ticket or other documented proof of travel. The list goes on.
“Not the Pinko Commies”
We drove 100 miles north out of Houston to Ken Paxton country. In the small town of Sealy, deep in rural Red Texas at the early polling station, we clocked only a single lonely voter, outnumbered by curious cows, skinny ones (“hamburger on the hoof”) that sidled up to our camera.
Outside the Saddleback Saloon on Main Street, Bradley Spaulding, who sells gun silencers, said he had no problem with Trump sending agents into the polls. “If you're not doing anything illegal… I'm not afraid of my law enforcement agencies of any sort. I mean, this is Texas.”
Like other Republicans we spoke with, Spaulding is voting for Paxton for the Senate, but without much enthusiasm. “I'm going to hold my nose and vote for not the pinko Commies.”
Thrown out in her nightgown
In San Antonio, Raw Story spoke with Lydia Camarillo, President of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), a group known for its non-partisan Latino Mobilization. She is concerned about the fear factor in this down-to-the-wire Senate race.
She said that one friend of hers, Lydia Martinez, an 87-year old who helps register other elderly voters, was rousted out of her home at 6 a.m. by the Texas Election Integrity police acting at the direction of Texas’ chief law enforcement officer — who is also Ken Paxton.
Paxton’s men overturned her home, seizing her phone, her computer and private papers while locking her outdoors in her nightgown.
No aliens were found in her home, nor evidence she had registered any.
Nevertheless, Paxton crowed on TV about his bust of Martinez and other alleged volunteer voter helpers whom he accused of registering non-citizens.
Paxton’s office did not respond to our request for an explanation nor his evidence to justify the home invasion. Camarillo spoke for Martinez who could not comment directly because of ongoing litigation.
Ultimately, the courts threw out the cases against all those Paxton accused. And, no small fact, in the past four-year election cycle, not one single alien was convicted of voting in a Texas election.
Remember the Massacre
In Texas, football, history and elections are contact sports.
To promote a revisionist White Liberator version of history, the State Legislature has laundered Texas schoolbooks, says Manuel Garza, SVREP’s Field Director.
“They always tell us to ‘Remember the Alamo!”
Garza, whose office is down from the Alamo tourist attraction, said, “But they want us to forget La Matanza.” La Matanza is The Massacre. He explained that, between 1910 and 1920, three thousand Mexican ethnics and indigenous people like himself were gunned down, lynched or burned alive by Texas Rangers, vigilantes and the US Calvary.
For a frightening comparison, that’s roughly the same number of Black people lynched by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Massacre and history of “No Mexicans” signs left generational scars, amplifying the power of voter intimidation tactics.
Race relations in Texas remain raw and memories still sting. Back at the Saddleback Saloon, the wall carried a faded warning, “Members only” partly covered up by old bottles. It was covered because, I was told, the message continued, ‘NO N----RS.’
Retaliation and 2028
To some extent, Camarillo sees this Senate race as a dry run for the 2028 Presidential, a test kitchen for new vote suppression techniques aimed at the growing Hispanic, Black and Asian-American Texas electorate.
“If in fact Latinos turn out at the levels that we think they're going to turn out, then what we're also going to see is that Texas is a competitive state for 40 electoral votes in 2028.”
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One battle brewing over the horizon: The state has put over 1.4 million Texans on a “suspension” list, concentrating on the single county of Travis, home of the solid-Democratic city of Austin. The “suspended” citizens may vote in this week’s contest but thousands will lose their vote in 2028.
Camarillo says SVREP’s donors have been warned away from her group, and the arrest of fellow registration volunteers sends a dark signal, “An attempt to block Latinos from voting and to scare us and to give us the fear. But I'm going to use Lydia Martinez's words, ‘They try to scare us, but I'm not scared at all. I'm showing up and continue to take people to vote.’"
DOGE and retaliation
In Houston, Agent Little acknowledged that other agents were unlikely to join his legal protest on which the courts have yet to rule. “A lot of us just survived DOGE, so some people are still a little traumatized. People are literally being fired for being called whistleblowers.”
At the polling station, James Smokie Phillips, the Constable (sheriff) for south Houston, says he will not tolerate lawbreaking even by feds with badges who might cross that orange line. His natty purple plainclothes suit covers his ability to enforce Texas law. Constable Smokie says, with a quiet laugh, “I’m packing heat."
Filmmaker and journalist Greg Palast is author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. You can stream his new film, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen at GregPalast.com. Produced by Martin Sheen, narrated by Rosario Dawson.
