ICE won’t rule out making arrests at polling places during the November midterm elections in the event of “an active public safety threat,” the Department of Homeland Security admitted to Raw Story.
The details of what would constitute such a threat were left vague.
The statement comes as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces an Aug. 7 deadline to begin turning over some 11,000 documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party, and Secretary Markwayne Mullin is threatening prison time for election officials who refuse to go along with a demand by the Trump administration that states purge alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls.
“ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” the department said in an email to Raw Story last week that was attributed to a “DHS official.” “ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.”
The statement from DHS is the strongest signal yet of the administration’s intentions to potentially deploy federal agents or soldiers to polling places — an intimidation tactic promoted by Trump ally Steve Bannon that has raised alarms among Democrats and democracy advocates.
ICE had previously told the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, it had no records in response to its FOIA Lawsuit seeking documents from DHS, the Department of Justice and Department of Defense on potential deployment of federal forces to voting sites and other election locations.
But the agency was forced to take a second look after the DNC pointed to media reports on ICE agents showing up at voting sites during primary elections in Texas and California, and entering a polling place in New York state to question a poll worker about a social media post she made that was critical of the agent who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Separately, the government disclosed that the Department of Justice’s FOIA office is consulting with “other DOJ components and Executive Branch agencies,” suggesting a high-level review of 55 pages of “potentially responsive records,” according to the government’s report to a federal judge overseeing the case. The government has committed only to “issuing a response” on those documents by Saturday.
While Democrats brace for the presence of ICE agents and other federal officers at polling places in November, the Trump administration is making wide-ranging claims about supposed foreign interference in U.S. elections and trumpeting a claim that DHS found 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
David Becker, executive director of the pro-democracy group Center for Election Innovation & Research, cast doubt on that claim.
“The public voter files used by the federal government do not have any unique identifiers, so no matter what list they compare to, there’s no methodologically sound way to get valid voter registration matches,” he said, adding that it’s impossible to accurately match names from public voter lists with commercial data if either is missing a Social Security number.
“All you would get — and this may have been the intent — is a boatload of false positives,” Becker continued. “I suspect this is why DHS is hiding the ball, refusing to share its list with the states or even disclose in detail its methodology, even as they threaten the states. This number has no bearing on reality and may just as well have been made up.”
DHS’s statement to Raw Story about ICE potentially making arrests at polling places echoes Mullins’ comments during an interview last month with CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“ICE agents are there to flex, if we need to,” Mullin said. “You saw ICE at TSA lines, not processing, but in the soft areas. If a threat were to arise, for whatever reason, at a polling station — say a bomb threat would be called in — our ICE agents are more than just immigration customs enforcement; they’re also trained to have SRT, which means that we can have an emergency team respond quickly.”
Mullin added that agents would not engage in “voter identification.”
Todd Blanche, who is up for confirmation as attorney general, has also expressed support for deploying ICE agents to polling places.
“Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” Blanche asked during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. “Illegals can’t vote.”
The White House did not respond on the record to an inquiry about whether Trump or other White House officials have held discussions with Mullin, Blanche or other leaders about the possibility of deploying federal agents to voting sites during the midterm elections.
During his July 17 press briefing, Mullin invoked “national security” as a component of election administration, moving the midterm elections into a realm in which courts have historically granted the executive branch more deference. Mullins’ remarks dovetailed with Trump’s argument — contradicted by the very declassified intelligence files he cited — that the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden was marred by foreign interference from China and Venezuela.
Mullin has a history of entertaining conspiracy theories about Venezuelan election interference, going back to before his confirmation as homeland security secretary in March.
As a U.S. senator, Mullin arranged for a group of election conspiracists pushing the unfounded claim that the Venezuelan government electronically manipulated votes in the 2020 election to meet with the Trump campaign, according to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. The meeting at Mar-a-Lago in October 2024 — first reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen — brought together Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil and Trump campaign co-chair Susie Wiles, now the president’s chief of staff.
Mullin demonstrated a familiarity with the ideas promoted by Rodil, Byrne and their associates during a December 2025 appearance on the “The Benny Johnson Show.”
“Venezuela has been a hub for this,” Mullin told Johnson. “There’s also a relationship between China and Russia that’s also involved in this. And we know that they have been trying to get in our elections…. We also allowed those investors to be part of some of the stuff we thought was impenetrable, which had been some of our election cycles and our election machines and the way we look at to it.”
During his July 17 press briefing outlining plans to address supposed election vulnerabilities, Mullin went a step further.
“Foreign adversaries have parts that are vital pieces in our voting machines,” he said. “We know that they can access what they consider the key to the back of these machines. We know they can change voter registration and your vote. We know it’s possible. There’s not a question. It’s not even for debate.”
Mullin’s claims are contradicted by a CIA report released by the White House in tandem with Trump’s national address reflecting that the agency developed intelligence showing that the Venezuelan government never developed the capability to manipulate elections outside its own borders. Smartmatic, an election technology company at the center of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, cut ties with the Venezuelan government in 2018. And in January 2026, the U.S. military deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, leaving in place his former vice president Delcy Rodriguez to lead the country.
Lawyers for the Democratic Party have questioned the government’s inability to produce a single record, to date, on the potential for the deployment of federal agents and soldiers by pointing to Mullin’s public statements on the topic and the fact that ICE agents have already been spotted at voting sites around the country.
The previous assertion that ICE “did not locate any responsive records” demonstrated “remarkable lack of diligence,” the Democrats said in a joint status report filed earlier this month. “Following receipt of a no-records response, the DNC flagged repeated ICE deployments to polling places and Secretary of Homeland Security Mullin’s testimony on the subject.”
