How ICE Is Targeting the 2026 Midterms

Olga Rivera Galati, a deputy director at We Are Casa, an immigrant-advocacy organization, was starting her car in the parking lot outside her office, in York, Pennsylvania, when a white S.U.V. pulled into the spot next to her. It was just after five o’clock, on August 18th. Rivera Galati, who is fifty-five and was born and raised in Lancaster County, was seven months into the job. Her work included providing social services such as access to employment counselling and health care to low-income, minority residents in central Pennsylvania. She reversed a few feet out of the parking space, then stopped. The S.U.V. backed out beside her. In a panic, she pulled forward and parked. The S.U.V. did the same.

Rivera Galati, whose parents moved to Pennsylvania from Puerto Rico, was carrying her passport and birth certificate. “I’m a U.S. citizen, but I didn’t feel that way that day,” she told me. “I thought, I’m Hispanic.” There were now six S.U.V.s parked on the street outside her office. Another one rolled up slowly behind her. Rivera Galati believes the agents, who drove off when she got out of her car to confront them, were taking down her license-plate number. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been an unavoidable presence in the area during Donald Trump’s second term. But, lately, the unmarked S.U.V.s, widely recognized as the kind used by the agency, seemed to be multiplying. “As we got closer to the election, in the summer, is when it picked up,” Rivera Galati said. “They’re literally everywhere.” (“None of this ever happened,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told me, when asked for comment. “ICE doesn’t even have any white S.U.V.s in York, Pennsylvania.”)

In early June, Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, issued an internal report on noncitizen voting. The phenomenon is virtually nonexistent—research has repeatedly shown that isolated votes cast by noncitizens have never affected the outcome of an election—but the President has turned it into a pretext to involve the Department of Homeland Security in the midterms. The June report stated that there were efforts at multiple branches of the Department to identify organizations that “may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal alien registration and voter encouragement.” Groups in several states, including Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio, were being investigated, but two locations were sources of special interest: Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Department reviewed eighty-two N.G.O.s in Pennsylvania alone. We Are Casa is almost certainly one of them.

D.H.S.’s role in elections has, until recently, been limited to technical issues like monitoring cyberattacks and defending critical infrastructure. Its prominent place in this election cycle is without precedent. In the lead-up to the midterms, the Trump Administration has sued thirty states, along with the District of Columbia, which have refused to turn over complete voter records; D.H.S. wants to cross-check them with its own databases. Federal courts have mostly rebuffed these lawsuits. But hundreds of Department officials have been assigned to search for unlawful voters. Agents from H.S.I., together with personnel from the fraud division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, have been routinely contacting county boards of elections to request voter files.

At the same time, according to a government whistle-blower, D.H.S. officials have been impersonating voters and entering their personal information into state voter databases, which is likely a violation of privacy laws. (The D.H.S. spokesperson denied that it was doing anything controversial and described these practices as “commonplace law enforcement.”) Between August and mid-September, leadership at U.S.C.I.S. imposed quotas: staff were required to investigate forty names per day, at a rate of roughly twelve minutes per subject. To conduct these searches, D.H.S. seems to have purchased commercially available voter data and run it through agency databases to turn up the names of noncitizens; the process is notoriously error-prone, generating frequent false positives. The fixation on illegal voting has also meant that other work was being neglected. At H.S.I., between ten and fifteen per cent of agents are investigating voter fraud. Jason Houser, a former high-ranking ICE official, told me, “Agents should be focussed on dismantling fentanyl-trafficking networks, combating child exploitation, and taking violent criminals off our streets.”

These efforts are being directed by political appointees at the top of the Department and at the White House. “They’re zealots,” a former H.S.I. official told me. “They won’t believe anything that doesn’t prove their point.” Anthony Salisbury, the current head of H.S.I., personally reports to Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff. “It’s all directed by Miller,” the former official said. Elsewhere within the government, conspiracists with discredited views about voter fraud now have prominent roles overseeing elections. One of them is Heather Honey, a conservative researcher from Pennsylvania whose skewed data on the 2020 results was cited by Trump as grounds for contesting the outcome. Last year, she was appointed to a job that didn’t exist during the Presidency of Joe Biden: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at D.H.S.

Earlier this summer, Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that the Department had found more than two hundred and fifty thousand potential noncitizens registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The Trump Administration has provided no evidence to back up Mullin’s claim. D.H.S. said it had found sixteen thousand potential noncitizen voters in Nevada, but, by late September, the Department had submitted the names of only a hundred and eight-five to the state for review. A subsequent investigation by Nevada election officials revealed that each person on the D.H.S. list was a citizen. (“Since then,” the D.H.S. spokesperson told me, Department officials have “manually confirmed about two thousand more aliens from the same list.”)

Pennsylvania, for its part, was told in July that some fifteen thousand people should be investigated. Votebeat, a nonprofit newsroom focussed on covering elections, obtained e-mails between D.H.S. and the state. According to the Secretary of the Commonwealth, D.H.S. representatives said at a virtual meeting held with state officials, in August, that “they did not have high confidence” that the people identified by Mullin “were, in fact, noncitizens who had improperly registered to vote.” (D.H.S. called the Secretary’s letter a “blatant mischaracterization.”)

Predictably, the few cases in which legal permanent residents, who cannot legally vote, were found to have actually done so have received outsized attention. On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it was charging twenty-eight green-card holders in California with election-related crimes. Twenty-one of them, officials said, had voted illegally. The others appear to have never actually voted, or they registered more than twenty years ago. The government has accused some of them of making false statements about whether they had ever been registered to vote when they later applied to become naturalized citizens. These names came from a list of twenty thousand people who the Trump Administration claims are on the California voter rolls despite likely being noncitizens. In a letter sent last week, the acting Deputy Attorney General warned California officials that they could be prosecuted for knowingly processing votes “cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens.” On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”

To date, the Department of Justice has accused a hundred and fifty-six people of violating election laws nationwide, and in the past two months, the government’s attempts to find further instances of fraud have intensified. Armed D.H.S. agents, in uniforms and flak jackets, have been knocking on doors in multiple states to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they were registered to vote, CBS News reported. “It seems that they’re trying to manufacture a narrative any way they can,” Claire Trickler-McNulty, another former senior ICE official, told me. “They can now arrest green-card holders without convictions who are accused of voting.”

Inside D.H.S. there may be at least a tacit acknowledgment that the campaign to uncover voter fraud hasn’t generated results. On August 26th, ICE officers were instructed to fill out an additional field in the “Biographics Section” for those it detained: “Have you voted in a federal election?” About a month later, the agency added another prompt: “If you answer ‘Yes’ to ‘Have you ever voted in a federal election,’ you must now specify how the subject voted: Mail-in Ballot [or] In Person.” The purpose of these questions, Houser told me, is “to create an investigative paper trail.” “You question enough people, particularly individuals who may be intimidated or confused by federal agents, and you’re going to get inconsistent statements,” he said. “That doesn’t establish voter fraud, but it can generate investigative reports, referrals, and individual cases that the Administration could later point to as evidence of a broader problem.”

York County falls partly in Pennsylvania’s Tenth Congressional District, which is currently represented by the Republican Scott Perry, a Trump ally who, in 2020, had attempted to overturn the state’s election results and later disregarded a congressional subpoena over his involvement in the January 6th riots at the Capitol. In 2024, Trump carried the county with sixty-two per cent of the vote; that year, Perry, who is running for his eighth consecutive term, beat his Democratic opponent, Janelle Stelson, a former newscaster, by five thousand votes. This year, Stelson has a significant funding advantage, and polls show her with a slight lead.

On October 7th, Charles Wall, the deputy director of ICE, issued a press release: “It’s unbelievable that Janelle Stelson would employ an illegal alien to work on a Congressional campaign, let alone a pervert who exposed himself in public.” This was a reference to a Nigerian immigrant who was arrested in East Pennsboro Township on September 27th after police investigated a report of a suspicious vehicle parked in a residential neighborhood. According to the incident report, which was obtained by the Associated Press, when the man opened his car door, the officer noticed that his “genitals were exposed.” The man was booked for indecent exposure, and eventually handed over to ICE. (He pleaded guilty to one count of disorderly conduct; the indecent exposure charge was dropped.) There were flyers for Stelson in his car, the report noted. But D.H.S. has refused to substantiate its claim that the man was employed by Stelson’s campaign. She has denied that he worked for her, which campaign-finance reports confirm. The ICE press release cited a news report that quoted a conservative activist who made the allegation. According to e-mails viewed by Axios, the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that monitors the behavior of government employees, is looking into whether Wall violated the Hatch Act, which limits partisan activities by executive-branch officials.

The police departments of several towns in and around York County, meanwhile, have signed partnerships—known as 287(g) agreements—with the Trump Administration to receive federal funding in exchange for collaborating with ICE. Routine traffic stops enable police officers to detain someone and then transfer them directly to ICE. More than five hundred immigrants have been arrested by local law enforcement in the county since 2025, according to data analyzed by the Philadelphia Inquirer. During that time, some thirty-one per cent of all 287(g) arrests made in Pennsylvania occurred in York County, despite it comprising less than four per cent of the state’s population. This year, canvassers with We Are Casa stopped working in Spring Garden and West York borough, two independent municipalities in the county, because of the 287(g) agreements.

On September 4th, a Haitian pastor named Molis Augustave was stopped by the West Manchester Township police for a broken headlight. Augustave, who is married to a U.S. citizen and had been living in York with his two-year-old son and nine-year-old stepdaughter, lost his legal status weeks earlier, when the Trump Administration cancelled Temporary Protected Status for three hundred and thirty thousand Haitians in the U.S. Augustave had a pending application for a green card—as a result of his marriage—and a previous petition for asylum. The officers transferred him to ICE custody. On September 24th, he was deported. Augustave had worked as an organizer for We Are Casa; when I visited the group’s office, banners and signs with his photograph still adorned the walls.

That afternoon, I joined a group of We Are Casa canvassers as they offered to register voters outside of a grocery store in the city of York. The team consisted of four women, two of whom were legal permanent residents. They couldn’t vote themselves, but seemed to take pride in registering those who could. Their work was not without risk. Several weeks earlier, someone spotted an ICE patrol vehicle in the store’s parking lot, and the canvassers decided to leave. On another occasion, one of them realized she’d left her green card at home, and rushed off to get it. “ICE has been going after people who are U.S. citizens, just for your accent,” Lymari, a Puerto Rican canvasser, told me. “It’s a huge stress for everyone.”

Marvin Hernández, a Salvadoran-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, is one of the lead organizers on the voter-registration unit. He told me that We Are Casa has registered five thousand eligible voters in York, Lancaster, and Dauphin counties since June. The group maintains a nonpartisan arm that handles voter registration, and a legally separate political entity that endorses specific candidates. When out in York, the voter-registration team wears red, the political canvassers blue. “Everyone on my team is trained not to fall into partisan issues,” Hernández told me. If someone asks them who they should vote for once registered, they tend to respond with bromides like “Vote your principles.” The training is rigorous, both because of the general scrutiny the organization is under and because any errors in processing a person’s information could invalidate the registration application. “Even without all the ICE activity, it’s an intense job,” he told me. “Now, though, it’s constant psychological warfare.” ♦