WASHINGTON — A coalition of civil rights groups and union organizations Friday sued the Trump administration to prevent the deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during November’s midterm elections.

The suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is the second this month, following comments from top Trump officials citing a federal policy to allow ICE officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement.

The groups argue the policy violates the federal law that prohibits “armed men” at election sites, and also causes voter intimidation, which is barred under the Voting Rights Act.

Under federal law, “troops” or “armed men” are allowed at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” And the section of the Voting Rights Act the groups cite prohibits “intimidation,” “threats,” or “coercion” against a person for voting or attempting to vote.

“The result is predictable: voters across the country—particularly Black, Latino, and Asian voters, naturalized citizens, and members of mixed-status families—are afraid to vote, help others vote, and participate in civic life,” according to the suit. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier this month noted that agents could conduct immigration enforcement at polling places. And before U.S. senators this week, FBI Director Kash Patel did not rule out sending FBI agents to polling locations, but said officers would “follow the law.”

The Department of Justice dismissed the idea that officers would be sent to polling locations. 

“The DOJ has never said it would send federal law enforcement to polling locations,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to States Newsroom. “Any suggestion otherwise is fearmongering.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said those “who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear.”

“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”

The DHS spokesperson added that ICE was not planning any operations that targeted polling locations. 

NAACP among groups suing

“We reject this administration’s attempt to desecrate our polling sites by converting them into militarized zones through the unlawful deployment of ICE or any other federal agent,” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel, said in a statement. 

NAACP is one of nine groups that filed suit. The rest are Mi Familia en Accion, Asian Pacific American Advocates, the National Urban League, Minnesota 8, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the International Union of Painters and the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

“Turning the fundamental right of exercising our vote into a high-stakes encounter with the militarized strong arm of the current administration isn’t protection and it isn’t oversight; it’s disenfranchisement, period,” Clarke said. “The NAACP calls on the court to reject this blatant attempt by federal officials to obstruct our elections through tactics pulled straight from the Jim Crow playbook.” 

The nine groups are represented by the Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the National Immigration Law Center, Protect Democracy and the Democracy Defenders Fund. 

Voting rights groups and Democratic officials are looking to defend against what they see as possible election interference from the Trump administration ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, now that they’ve won a major battle over mail ballots.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization, announced a “voter protection” campaign Thursday that would place thousands of volunteers at polling sites in 25 states.

The initiative is designed to counter potential administration moves to intimidate voters, such as ordering troops or law enforcement officers to polling places.

The Democratic Party is also upping its voter protection efforts, launching its own initiative this week to deploy 10,000 volunteers to assist voters at polling locations in all 50 states plus seven U.S. territories.

Both efforts are described as preemptive efforts to head off any possible attempts by President Donald Trump to skew election results. Trump for years has alleged, without evidence, U.S. elections are beset by myriad attempts at fraud.

He has used that pretext in attempts to enact policies to restrict voting, including the order limiting vote-by-mail that the U.S. Supreme Court blocked for this election. 

‘Breathing down our neck’

Voting rights advocates say they are preparing for more efforts to dissuade voters from casting ballots. 

Voters are “facing aggressive and deliberate threats from this administration and anti-voter forces that are tied to this administration,” Common Cause CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said. “Whether it be voter intimidation at the polls, the attacks on mail-in voting or attempts to collect your personal data, the barriers that voters are facing right now … are not only real, they are urgent. And they are intentionally designed to make everyday Americans give up.”

The Democratic plan, led by the Association of State Democratic Conferences, a coalition of the 57 state and territorial party leaders, was also in part a reaction to Trump, ASDC Chair Jane Kleeb said in an interview.

“We had to react to the threat that was breathing down our neck,” Kleeb, who is also the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said in an interview.

Trump has broadly accused Democrats of trying to cheat, and has placed particular focus on the possibility of noncitizens voting.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis wrote in a Thursday email that the administration would continue to guard against that possibility.

“Despite extreme Democrats and the media claiming it never happens, the evidence of non-citizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up,” Bis wrote. “Any non-citizens found registering and voting in our elections will be arrested and held accountable. Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

The Justice Department has charged a handful of voter fraud cases of foreign nationals in recent months. 

The administration has also argued a software glitch in New Jersey that registered 6,600 noncitizens showed why tighter regulations on voting are needed.

“There continues to be a narrative and a concern that noncitizens are voting,” Ari Mittleman, the executive director of the civic education group Keep Our Republic, said, adding that examples like the New Jersey glitch kept the issue “on the minds of many.”

Troops at the polls?

Common Cause officials and Kleeb highlighted the possibility of federal troops or law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at polling places as a strong concern.

“We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump is going to do,” Kleeb, whose interview was conducted before the Supreme Court’s mail voting decision on Sept. 14, said. “But if we take him at his word, he will disrupt the vote-by-mail process, and he will have people outside of polling locations to intimidate voters.”

Administration officials have dismissed the idea of sending federal agents to the polls, but have not completely ruled it out. 

FBI Director Kash Patel repeatedly dodged the question during a U.S. Senate hearing Wednesday.

At a press conference this month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE would not have a sizable presence at election sites, but could deploy as part of the agency’s routine duties.

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” Mullin said. “We’re there to enforce specific threats. The only reason why we would be at polling places: Because there is a threat to that polling place or we are serving a warrant on someone we are actively tracking down.”

And then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called a question about sending ICE agents to the polls “disingenuous” at a February press briefing.

“I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November. I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question,” she said. “But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”

Disinformation, distrust

Trump’s relentless focus on election regulations has contributed to a distrust of elections. Only 34% of adults in a AP-NORC and USAFacts poll this month said they trust government certifications of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit.”

Solomon said on the Thursday press call announcing the voter protection drive that the administration and its allies were seeking to sow distrust in the election.

The program, which the group said was the country’s largest nonpartisan election protection effort, hopes to counter that narrative by installing voter advocates at polling stations.

Volunteers will receive about an hour to 90 minutes of training on their state’s voting laws and how to help voters. ASDC volunteers will also receive about an hour of training. 

“They are trained to check for things like signage, polling place accessibility, long lines,” Common Cause Director of Policy Carol Evans said. “They are trained to be a positive and joyful presence at the polls to make the experience better for voters. And importantly, they are our eyes and ears on the ground to alert us to serious issues.”

In another voter education initiative, Keep Our Republic has launched a series of town hall-style events in the five states in which it operates — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to give election officials a platform to speak to voters and increase trust in the election process, Mittleman said.

WASHINGTON — Latino advocacy groups and voting rights organizations Thursday filed a suit in federal court challenging the Trump administration’s policy of allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement during the 2026 midterm elections. 

The suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia argues that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s recent comments that ICE agents would be at polling locations for the purpose of immigration enforcement violates federal law that prohibits federal “armed men” at election sites. 

The statute allows for “troops” or “armed men” at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” 

“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” according to the lawsuit. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal immigration enforcement officers if they choose to cast a ballot.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a DHS spokesperson said that “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations.” 

“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 spokesperson said. 

Earlier this month, Mullin said that ICE officers at polling locations would be there “to enforce specific threats.” 

“The only reason why we would be at polling places, if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration (and) custom enforcement. That’s their job and so if we’re doing something, we’re doing that specifically.”

The suit asks the federal court to prevent the Trump administration from following that polling place policy and declaring it unlawful, as well as barring “officers from operating or carrying weapons in the vicinity of open polling places, including dropboxes, curbside voting locations, and similar places where votes are taken, collected, received, counted, or certified during early voting periods and on Election Day itself, for any reason other than repelling armed enemies of the United States.”

The civil rights groups that joined the suit said the tactic would lead to voter suppression.

“Sending armed ICE officers to polling places is not immigration enforcement — it is voter suppression, plain and simple,” UnidosUS President Janet Murguía said in a statement. “All Americans — including Latino voters  — have a constitutional right to cast their ballot without fear of interrogation, detention, or family separation.”

The suit was filed by the oldest U.S. Latino civil rights organization, League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; the largest Hispanic civil rights organization, UnidosUS; the voter mobilization group Common Cause; and the city and county of Denver, Colorado, which has a large immigrant population and has been targeted by ICE multiple times for immigration enforcement. 

“The right to vote, and to do so without fear of intimidation, is fundamental to our democracy and to being an American,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement. “Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes. We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said earlier this year he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” this fall, declining to rule out sending the National Guard or federal law enforcement officers to polling locations throughout the country.

Those comments came a few months after Trump casually and briefly mentioned canceling the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. 

Any such actions would lie outside the bounds of presidential power and the law, according to experts interviewed by States Newsroom. Nonetheless, one Democratic U.S. senator is sending letters to numerous members of the administration asking for commitments troops won’t be sent to the polls, and state officials are readying plans to keep voting secure.

“The president can say whatever he wants, but his powers are extraordinarily limited in this way,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. 

With two months until voting ends on Nov. 3, the administration’s only publicly disclosed plan to monitor elections is a decades-old Justice Department program that sends federal workers throughout the country.

Michigan Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie said there are strict rules for the people who participate, including that they can only observe if state election officials allow it or if a court orders it. 

Edevbie said his state will allow DOJ monitors during this fall’s elections to observe but not to interfere. 

“Their job is not to interrogate individual voters,” he said. “Now outside of the polling location, outside of the 100 feet, if they want to talk to a voter, they absolutely can. But if those interactions tip over into actions that we deem to be actions of intimidation, we will revoke our permission for them to be here.”

The Department of Justice declined an interview request from States Newsroom, writing in a statement the administration hopes “to have the largest monitoring effort in the Department’s history,” totaling around 1,000.

DOJ election observers have been dispatched to monitor primary elections throughout the year without much fanfare, though Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said in late August that their behavior in his state was “a bit aggressive.” 

“It just was irregular, and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” Gordon said, according to reporting from WyoFile, an independent nonprofit newsroom.

Will ICE be sent to the polls?

White House staff have sent somewhat mixed messages on what else the president may try to do. A White House spokesperson wrote in an email they wouldn’t “engage in hypotheticals,” adding that “Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

The spokesperson pointed to comments former press secretary Karoline Leavitt made in February when she said she hadn’t heard the president say he would consider sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations. 

Trump has repeatedly raised concerns that noncitizens may try to vote in the elections, despite it being illegal. There, however, isn’t much evidence of that having happened, with the Bipartisan Policy Center writing, “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Leavitt added, “I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November. I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It’s a disingenuous question.”

A few months later, Trump was asked whether he would rule out sending the National Guard or ICE officers to polling locations. He did not answer the question directly. 

“I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections. We have to have honest elections,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly raised grievances about the outcome of the 2020 election without providing any evidence of fraud significant enough to change the outcome. He hasn’t expressed doubts about election integrity in 2016 or 2024 — the years he won despite a Democratic president running the country at the time. 

This year, Trump has said he believes Democrats can only win if they cheat without releasing any proof of fraud or plans for sabotage. At the same time, he’s acknowledged that, historically speaking, Republicans are likely to lose seats in Congress during the November midterm elections.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during a press conference in early September that ICE officers “will be where we need to be” when serving warrants. He did not rule out an ICE presence under some circumstances.

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats. The only reason why we would be at polling places, if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration (and) custom enforcement. That’s their job and so if we’re doing something, we’re doing that specifically.”

‘Egregious history’ 

Federal law enforcement officers cannot enter polling places under most circumstances, according to Steve Huefner, the C. William O’Neill professor in Law and Judicial Administration at Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.

“There’s this really egregious history of uniformed police officers intimidating Black voters in the Jim Crow era, and so today we have laws that prohibit uniformed officers from being observers at the polling place,” he said.

Additionally, there’s a federal law from the Civil War era that bars any federal official with a weapon from showing up at polling locations, unless that “force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”

Those prohibitions apply at the polling site and usually within 100 feet of that location, sometimes more. But there could be a loophole beyond that radius, Huefner said. 

“If they just happen to be very close to a polling place, but not within 100 feet, it probably gets much trickier to figure out whether the president can have military troops in that kind of circumstance,” he said. 

Any attempt to place either federal law enforcement, the National Guard or military members at or near polling locations would likely end up in the court system, which Huefner said would in many ways be “uncharted territory.”

“It’s being characterized as an effort to help states, but states aren’t asking for this help,” he said. “States don’t feel like they need this help. States feel perfectly adequate to run safe, free, fair elections. And so it’s uncharted in the sense that we’ve never seen this kind of tension between states and the federal government. And this worry that what’s happening is an effort to intimidate voters on the part of the federal government.”

Slotkin letters

Members of Congress have also raised concerns the president may try to send members of the military or National Guard to polling locations. 

Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin sent letters to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine in August, asking they provide assurances the government wouldn’t “send Federal troops to the polls or to seize election materials of any kind.”

Slotkin requested the two “confirm that deploying the military to polling places for political purposes would undermine the integrity of our free and fair elections, pose an existential threat to our democracy, and taint the military as a politicized institution.”

Caine replied in a letter released by Slotkin’s office that the joint forces had and would continue to act ”in accordance with the Constitution and the law.”

“Election administration and security remain the fundamental responsibility of state and local officials,” he wrote. “The Joint Force has no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections. Likewise, the Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material.”

Hegseth hadn’t responded as of early September and a Pentagon spokesperson wrote in a statement that as “with all Congressional correspondence, the Department will respond directly to the member.”

States make plans

Bellows, the Maine Secretary of State, said she and other elected officials are planning for several scenarios that could come up during election season, building on past experiences. 

“We have run free, fair and secure elections through pandemics, through heightened threats in 2024. In Maine, for example, there were six swatting incidences at polling locations and voting continued uninterrupted,” she said. 

Despite the president’s comments throughout the year, Bellows said the Constitution and law “are crystal clear that federal law enforcement, ICE or otherwise, are strictly prohibited at polling places.”

Maine law also makes it illegal to interfere with anyone’s voting rights, which Bellows said she and others in state government will be watching closely this fall. 

“If any federal armed officer were interfering with a citizen’s right to vote on Election Day, we would take every available legal action to disrupt and prosecute that because that is criminal and prohibited,” she said. 

Director of Elections for Washington state Stuart Holmes said the Constitution and court rulings have made it clear that only state legislatures and Congress have the ability to regulate elections. 

“And until either of those act, it’s business as usual,” he said. 

The Department of Justice could send election observers to Washington state this fall, Holmes said, but those people wouldn’t have any more authority or access than the regular citizens who are also allowed to observe certain aspects of the election. 

“They can come in and they can watch and observe the process,” he said. “But the county auditor or elections director in that county is the administrator of that process and can set the rules based on the safety and operations of their facility.”

It is illegal for anyone to interfere with a voter’s ability to cast a ballot, regardless of whether they’re near or inside a polling location. That would include an observer asking voters to show their identification, Holmes said. 

“Doing something like that could be seen as intimidating or interfering with their ability to cast their vote freely,” he said. 

Despite the speculation around what Trump may or may not do, Holmes said he and other officials in Washington state are preparing much like they would for any other midterm elections.