Inside the Plan to Stop/Melt ICE at the Polls

DURING A PRIVATE CALL last Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security official Heather Honey vowed to election officials around the country that ICE would not be at the polls in November, calling the idea “disinformation.”

“There will be no ICE presence at polling locations,” she said, according to Politico.

But others who dialed in to the conversation didn’t leave convinced. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who was on the line, waved away Honey’s promises as empty on account of her past efforts pushing the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

“I can’t depend on an election denier like that for the truth under any circumstances,” he told Politico. Honey—who serves in a newly created role at DHS, deputy assistant secretary for election integrity—was an activist in Pennsylvania whose research Trump attempted to use to overturn the 2020 election.

Fontes’s skepticism is justified. Trump has already called to “nationalize” elections—and Republicans in the House passed the SAVE America Act, which stipulates national voter ID requirements—to stem voting by “illegal aliens,” as the president alleged is happening in his State of the Union speech. Others on the call expressed sentiments similar to Fontes’s.

“I did not walk away from this meeting reassured that the federal government wouldn’t try to interfere in state sovereignty over the election,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told NBC News.

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Concerns over what Trump may do to influence the 2026 elections are serious enough that Democratic-run states are already taking steps to mitigate the threat. Even before the Wednesday call, advocacy groups, lawyers, and organizers were preparing for ICE to try to come to the polls. In particular, they are bracing for the Trump administration to engage in acts of voter intimidation and voter suppression, especially in areas with voters of color. The result could be a huge swath of voters either being prevented from exercising their democratic right or being made to feel too nervous to even try to exercise it. All of it done in an attempt to keep Republicans in power.

A clear example of proactive, preventive work at the state level can be seen in Arizona, where earlier this month Republican lawmakers tried to pass a law basically “inviting ICE to the polls,” as my colleague Andrew Egger put it. It ultimately was pulled, with residents standing in line for hours to testify against the measure.

LUCHA Arizona, a political organizing group that has been at the forefront of Arizona’s turn from red to purple (the state went for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, and it now has two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor), was among those that saw the legislation as an important early bout in the national fight against ICE showing up at the polls.

Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of LUCHA AZ, said hearing ICE could be at the polls was a “chilling factor” for her two thousand-strong membership. But even though the legislation was pulled, there are many challenges ahead. For one, the bill can be resurrected at any moment. There is also the possibility that rebellious county recorders or other officials could ignore the law and allow ICE at the polls. In anticipation of such a scenario, she said, her group is preparing for legal challenges and an organizing fight.

Gomez said that LUCHA and the coalition it’s a part of, Activate 48, are prepared to “hold the line for democracy,” as Arizona groups have already done once with the recent legislative fight against ICE at the polls. They will also be active in the governor’s race and in working to flip the state legislature. Their goal is to knock on close to one million doors.

“This is a direct attack on immigrant and Latino communities, but right now it is having an effect on all communities,” Gomez told me. “What people witnessed with Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that ICE is a rogue force that uses violence to oppress and to scare people, and in Arizona, people are worried about violence when ICE is deployed.”

THAT FEAR IS REAL AND TANGIBLE. ICE may not show up at the polls in November, but just the prospect of Latinos, immigrants, and brown people getting detained by masked federal agents simply for deciding to exercise their right to vote could prove chilling.

Charles Kuck, a Georgia-based lawyer who often sues the Trump administration—he’s gone after them in response to their $100,000 fee gambit for H-1Bs and defended international students whom the administration tried to strip of legal status—said that while he believed the courts would rule against ICE being allowed to have a presence at the polls, the fear that the agency might try and show up poses a major problem.

“I don’t understand what legal basis they would have to have ICE at the polls,” he told me. “I think lawsuits would be filed that morning, and ICE would be forced to leave the polls. But the mere threat that it might happen would intimidate people from going to the polls, which is why