In a call Wednesday with many of the top voting officials across the country, a senior Department of Homeland Security official stated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would not be patrolling polling places during this year’s midterm elections.
“Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation,” said Heather Honey, DHS assistant secretary for election integrity, according to a participant on the call who spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity. “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations.”
Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams confirmed the promise in a social media post as well.
Federal law prohibits federal troops or law enforcement from interfering with voting, and states have the constitutional authority to run their own elections.
But for all of his second term, President Trump has voiced an openness to unprecedented involvement by the federal government in those state processes.
He has also continued to push false claims about noncitizen voter fraud — including during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address — and those in his orbit have openly discussed the potential of immigration enforcement at voting locations.
“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on his podcast earlier this month. “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”
Shortly after, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about those comments and she responded that she “can’t guarantee” that an ICE agent wouldn’t be around a polling location in November.
All of that has led to deep concern from voting officials from both major political parties, who say they are actively preparing for some sort of federal interference in this year’s midterms, though they have been hard-pressed to say what that involvement would look like. Those concerns were heightened after the recent FBI raid of the elections hub in Fulton County, Ga., which appears directly tied to debunked claims about Trump’s loss in 2020.
On Wednesday’s midterm preparations call — which included representatives from the Justice Department, DHS, the Postal Service and other federal agencies — multiple Democratic secretaries of state asked questions that alluded to that uncertainty.
California’s Secretary of State, Democrat Shirley Weber, asked Honey, the DHS official, whether states would have advance notice if ICE agents were sent to polling places.
Honey responded by saying such a premise was “disinformation.”
The promise is especially notable coming from Honey, who comes from the election denial grassroots that sprouted out of Trump’s false election claims in 2020. Before her current post at DHS, she worked closely with Trump’s former attorney Cleta Mitchell to spread misinformation about the reliability of the country’s voting systems.
