Day: January 30, 2026

Immigration enforcement is sowing chaos in Minneapolis and across the country. Democrats, elections officials and civil rights groups fear it could interfere with this November’s elections — and are scrambling for a response.

They’re warning that the White House’s deployments of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents could act as a voter suppression tool should armed officers conduct raids at or near polling locations, scaring citizens into staying home.

“You have to see what’s happening: Trump is trying to create a pretext to rig the election,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It stands to reason that this private police [force] that he’s building is, in part, to be used to try to suppress turnout in the election.”

Senate Democrats considered a requirement banning ICE agents from polling sites as part of their demands in negotiating the Homeland Security funding bill, according to Murphy and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). But that policy was not included in Senate Democratic appropriators’ final list of demands to avoid a partial government shutdown, leaving voting rights advocates and Democratic state election officials on edge about what’s to come.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called fears of voter suppression “Democrat conspiracies” with “no basis in reality.”

“President Trump cares deeply about the integrity of our elections — and so do the millions of Americans who sent him back to office based on his pledge to secure our elections,” Jackson said in a statement. “These Democrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn’t be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media. ICE is focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from [the] country, who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote.”

ICE’s aggressive crackdowns have already led to citizens hiding at home, and election officials worry that fears of harassment and arrest could keep them from exercising their right to vote.

“In Maine, we saw people were afraid to leave their homes for groceries, to go to work or to go to school, because of fear of wrongful arrest and imprisonment,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who’s running for governor, told POLITICO on Thursday. “If people are too afraid to go to the grocery store because armed ICE agents are patrolling the streets, that may increase fears about going to vote.”

Bellows said her office is preparing for next month’s special legislative election by ensuring voters are comfortable with absentee voting procedures, especially those in areas with large immigrant populations that have been impacted by ICE’s recent crackdown in the state.

Immigration enforcement activity near polling locations could dissuade those with noncitizen family members or voters of color, who fear being racially profiled, from turning out. And widespread deployments of immigration officers to battleground districts could cause chaos in key races and swing close elections.

The Trump administration dispatched about 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis to apprehend non-citizens in an operation that many in the state and elsewhere consider heavy-handed and excessive. The president and senior officials have indicated that the operation is about more than just law enforcement.

President Donald Trump called the Minnesota operation a “day of reckoning and retribution” and has tied the operation to welfare fraud in the state. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz demanding he turn over the state’s voter rolls, an action lawyers for the state of Minnesota described as a “shakedown” and a “ransom note.”

“The demand for the voter rolls tells you what this is really about,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who oversaw California’s elections for six years as secretary of state, told reporters Wednesday. “It’s about trying to rig the next election, and a desperate attempt to hold onto power.”

Federal law is explicit in banning “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” unless to “repel armed enemies of the United States[.]” Many local election officials also take great care to avoid spooking voters by placing law enforcement at polling places, and some states even have laws regulating this. Voter intimidation is illegal across the entire country.

But Trump has falsely and repeatedly claimed for more than a decade that millions of illegal immigrants vote in the U.S., arguing that was one factor in his 2020 loss. He also pledged before the 2020 election to send “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” to polling places.

Some Trump allies have openly described the possibility of deploying immigration enforcement officers to polling sites to ensure non-citizens do not vote.

“They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said during his show last August. “You’re damn right. … We’re not going to allow any illegal aliens to vote.”

Civil rights groups are preparing for the possibility that Trump exercises emergency powers to allow such a move.

Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, told reporters this week that the Trump administration is “using these violent ICE operations as a weapon” for political ends.

“[Trump] might try to use an executive order or his emergency powers in the 11th hour to interfere with the upcoming election, which is, of course, something that no president in American history has ever done, but something that we need to be prepared for,” Lydgate said Monday during a press briefing.

The Trump administration has continued its focus on election administration. On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta. Last week, the Justice Department revealed that DOGE employees were secretly communicating with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states” and may have used Social Security data to match voter rolls. Last week in Davos, Trump suggested prosecutions are forthcoming related to the 2020 election.

State election officials in both parties are anxious to see why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi will address the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday. A DHS spokesperson didn’t respond to request for comment for this story.

Nonprofit legal groups are already gearing up to challenge any efforts to intimidate voters around the November midterms, said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward.

“Litigation is going to remain an incredibly important guardrail,” said Perryman, whose nonprofit led one of the lawsuits against DOGE’s access to voter information. “And there are many cases that can be swiftly filed on an emergency basis, or even potentially proactively, in order to try to keep the communities as safe as possible.”

David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, warned that election officials across the country — from secretaries of state to local officers — are seeing “a level of federal interference in their work which is unconstitutional and unprecedented.”

“I want to stress how unusual this is,” Becker, a former DOJ civil rights attorney, told POLITICO. “County election officials shouldn’t have to be thinking about what the president of the United States might say about elections.”

Those elections officials are working to instill trust in the electoral process, Becker said, and will encourage voters to utilize a variety of alternative ways to cast a ballot, such as early voting or voting by mail, depending on the state.

An attempt to heighten immigration enforcement before the election could just as easily backfire for Republicans. Trump is now under water on the immigration issue, with polls showing a majority of voters believe his deportation push went too far and want to see it reined in. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the Biden White House as an adviser on democracy and voting rights, pointed to high turnout in this week’s special elections for Minnesota legislature seats in Democratic-heavy districts, where Democrats romped.

“In places where there might be disruption, Minnesota is proving that you might well earn yourself a real significant backlash,” Levitt said.

But even talking about election suppression has a risk of discouraging voters, convincing them there is risk involved or that the elections might be rigged anyway. Conversely, talk of vote-rigging can do the same thing.

“Our fight right now is both to protect the security of our elections and people’s faith in them, because they’re deeply intertwined and they’re both under attack,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

​Politics