What's Our Plan to Stop ICE From Stealing the Midterms?

Waiting until November would be a disaster. Time to go on offense to ban ICE from polling places.

MAGA leaders last week announced how they want to steal the midterms.

Within forty-eight hours of Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports across the country, Steve Bannon was on his War Room podcast explaining the plan. The airport deployment, he explained, was a “test run” to “really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” Bannon’s guest, MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, agreed enthusiastically: armed immigration agents should be stationed at polling places in November.

I wish we could dismiss this as hot air from two blowhards. But Trump’s airport initiative appears to be aimed at getting Americans used to seeing ICE officers everywhere, so that their presence at voting locations in the fall might feel like just one more step rather than a radical escalation.

Noncitizen voter fraud is the stated justification for Congressional Republicans’ voter suppression legislation, the SAVE Act. This bill would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship documentation to vote, a move that would disenfranchise roughly 21 million citizens. The administration’s own data, however, confirms that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. That hasn’t stopped leading Republicans, who see the upcoming midterms as an existential battle, from casting doubt on what’s left of our fragile democratic processes. They understand that posting armed federal agents at polling places can help swing the election by making it much harder for anti-Trump constituencies to vote during the midterms and in 2028.

On college campuses and in immigrant neighborhoods, for example, ICE agents could systematically demand that everybody in line show a passport or birth certificate — basically imposing the SAVE Act through force. Large-scale ICE provocations along these lines on election day could disrupt polling locations, dramatically drive down turnout, and cast doubt on any election results that don’t go Republicans’ way.

Bannon just said the quiet part out loud. This is voter suppression infrastructure being built in real time, in the open, with the explicit encouragement of the president’s close political allies. We should take them at their word.

Megan Varner / Getty Images

State Legislation Can Stop This. Where are Dems?

Federal law already prohibits deploying military personnel to polling stations. But there’s a gap: the law doesn’t explicitly cover civilian federal agencies like ICE. That’s the loophole the administration is exploiting. So why haven’t Democrats and pro-democracy organizations yet prioritized fights to fix this legal loophole?

States run their own elections in our federalized system. And any state legislature can pass a law explicitly barring armed federal agents from polling locations. Since blue states have their own armed forces, such a law would have real legal teeth — arguably more than a federal statute that this administration would never enforce against itself.

New Mexico has shown this is possible. On March 13, it became the first state to enact a law barring armed officers in federal service from polling sites or within 50 feet of a ballot box during the voting period. Similar legislation has been proposed only in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington.

Why isn’t every blue state legislature treating this as a five-alarm fire? We’re eight months from the midterms. Bannon and his allies are telling us, on the record, that the Trump administration intends to deploy armed immigration agents to polling places. And the administration itself has systematically refused to rule it out.

Shouldn’t campaigns for state legislation banning ICE at polling places become a priority for every union, every democracy defense organization, and every progressive coalition? Such fights would be a perfect next step to keep up momentum after recent No Kings marches and the upcoming May 1st actions.

The worst thing the pro-democracy movement can do right now is wait. Wait to see what Trump does in November, and it’ll be too late. Agents will already be at our polling places. And at our doors.

Building Fighting Capacity

Of course, legislation alone won’t save us. This administration has shown it’s willing to defy court orders and ignore laws it doesn’t like. But there are two reasons such fights could make a big difference.

First, the laws themselves matter, especially when enforcement does not depend on Trump’s whims. A clear state statute banning armed federal agents from polling locations gives election officials, state attorneys general, and courts a concrete legal basis for physically blocking deployment. It moves the fight from the murky terrain of verbal commitments and administrative discretion onto solid legal and institutional ground. Even an administration that doesn’t respect legal boundaries has to factor in the serious costs of openly violating state election laws or clashing with local police.

Second, what might matter even more: campaigns to pass these laws can build the bottom-up fighting capacity we need to defend democracy.

And rather than yet another backroom lobbying effort, we could leverage fights around passing these laws to get large numbers of ordinary people to talk to their co-workers, neighbors, and fellow students about the importance of defending democracy this November and beyond. Because whether your number one issue is rising costs, Palestine, or justice for immigrants, the precondition for achieving any progress on any of this is simple: preventing MAGA from permanently usurping political power.

Going on Offense

Instead of waiting and seeing what Trump will do in November, or planning only defensive actions, we can go on the offense now.

A campaign to ban ICE from polling places would provide a concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today, months before the election. Mass trainings could onboard and develop scores of new leaders in this fight nationwide.

This fight would set the debate on our terms, not Trump’s. It would create opportunities for rallies, town halls, and direct actions against intransigent electeds, creating opportunities to pull people into the movement who aren’t yet engaged. It would build the kind of organized, mobilized base that can respond rapidly when the administration escalates — whether that means ICE at the polls, federal seizure of voter data, or some new attack on electoral integrity we haven’t anticipated yet.

MAGA’s strategists are not hiding their plans. The question is whether we’re going to get organized enough to stop them.

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• My best student asked to speak with me after class Tuesday and immediately started weeping as she explained that ICE this week nabbed one of her family members. This administration’s cruelty at home and abroad is unbearable, I don’t know how I’d keep myself semi-together if I didn’t have organizing as an outlet to ward off depression. Appreciate all of you doing the work.

• The Schools Drop ICE campaign continues to build momentum — check out our new comprehensive database on contracts that 2,463 universities have with ICE enabling companies like Flock Safety, Enterprise, and ICE Air.

• Every student in the country should be building towards May 1 walkouts against ICE, war, and Trump! Sign up here for organizing support from Schools Drop ICE to make that happen.

• Please share this article widely, thank you! Due to your all’s intrepid boosting, the excellent NYT opinion writer Jamelle Bouie shared my article on anti-war strategy in his latest column, which impressed my mother (always an important metric).