The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) doesn’t need to send agents to polling places to start interfering in the election. They’re already doing it from their desks.
Asked this year whether the administration intended to put immigration agents in the middle of the midterms, senior officials gave a consistent answer. ICE “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” a top DHS official told a dozen Senate Democrats, and the department’s leadership assured lawmakers it had “no plans” to station immigration officers at voting locations, while pointedly declining to rule it out. (Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee later learned DHS attorneys had told a federal court the department might possess thousands of documents on the subject.)
Evidently, all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.
Last night, The Washington Post revealed that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.
Despite this effort being carried out in the dark, the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for “illegal” registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.
The newly disclosed effort adds to an already sweeping undertaking by Trump’s lieutenants to influence the midterm elections. Since returning to office, Trump has converted the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build “approved” lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.
Thousands of DHS agents and a growing number of federal prosecutors are being marshaled away from their actual responsibilities and pointed at America’s elections by a president simultaneously trying to seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot. Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.
Again, the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of “noncitizen voters.” But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185… then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.
I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.
But unlike 2020, when Trump brazenly sought to steal an election, we saw this coming from a mile away. While this year has seen some of the most unprecedented Executive Branch efforts to interfere in the democratic process, it’s also seen unprecedented efforts to protect our elections.
That’s one of the reasons I launched DEFIANCE.org. I’m not putting up with it this time. We’re not going to let Trump spin up another “Big Lie” and spring it on the American people. We’re going to fight like hell before the fighting even begins… and that’s what we’ve done:
In just the past few months, DEFIANCE.org has teamed up with Freedom Trainers to prepare everyday Americans to protect the vote, and we created and funded the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a coalition of locally elected prosecutors now training on exactly what to do if the administration sends ICE agents to the polls. We’re backing lawsuits against the administration’s illegal orders, including the Campaign Legal Center’s fight over the mail-in ballot executive order, and partnering with Keep Our Republic to raise the alarm about Trump’s potential misuse of emergency powers. We seeded Justice Connection’s DOJ and FBI whistleblower effort, so the people watching federal power being abused from the inside have a safe way to come forward. We put the Epstein Files on the road to keep Trump’s corruption in front of voters, funded nationwide May Day protests to prepare for possible mass walkouts after the election if it comes to that, and supported Leaving MAGA to help more people defect. And because the true aim of an operation like Trump’s is to convince eligible voters that showing up isn’t worth the risk, we’re funding the opposite: get-out-the-vote drives with Voto Latino in the very communities being targeted for suppression and with groups like Powered x People in critical battleground states.
The answer to intimidation is a margin of turnout so large that no manufactured fraud number can explain it away. That’s what we call the TOO BIG TO RIG coalition. And tonight at 5pm ET, we’ll announce another nationwide effort to protect our elections.
This week’s revelation from the Washington Post shows that Trump is already deploying his DHS agents to muck around in the vote. They may have reassigned hundreds of desk workers to the case. But I like our odds. Our team is an army of poll workers, lawyers, state officials, local prosecutors, and the voters themselves — and there are millions more of us than them.
Your friend, in defiance,
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