(Washington, DC) – The United States government should order federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers not to operate in the vicinity of polling places, early voting locations, or drop boxes during the midterm electoral period, Human Rights Watch said today. The presence of these federal agents could deter people from voting.
“ICE officers’ abuses have already seriously affected US citizens who have been stopped, beaten, detained, deported, and even killed,” said Philippe Bolopion, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “Voters should not have to fear being caught in an ICE dragnet when they head to the polls.”
In-person early voting is already taking place in the majority of states. In a nationwide September poll, 40 percent of respondents said they expect some kind of ICE presence at polls, with even higher percentages among non-white respondents expecting to see ICE agents in places people vote.
Federal law generally prohibits federal officials from sending “troops or armed men” to voting sites. Several state laws prohibit any armed officers, including police, from engaging in acts that could interfere with the elections or intimidate voters by their presence near polling places. Some states bar law enforcement officers, including police, from being in close proximity to polling places at all unless they are responding to a specific incident.
Despite these robust prohibitions, neither President Donald Trump nor the heads of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been willing to rule out the possibility that federal agents, including ICE, may be at places where people vote.
In March, then-Deputy Attorney General and now-Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “Why is there an objection to sending ICE to polling stations? ... Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.” In February, Karoline Leavitt, who was White House press secretary at the time, said she could not “guarantee” that ICE agents won’t be around a polling location in November.
In early September, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there were no plans to station ICE agents at polling places but left the door open for them to be there if “serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down” or if “there is a threat to that polling place.”
Three lawsuits are pending in federal courts to prevent ICE from operating at the polls, with an additional court case seeking to require the government to disclose its plans regarding ICE agents at polling places. In Washington, DC, the Board of Elections in October asked the National Guard to limit their presence near drop box locations for the midterm election following complaints that troops had been spotted near a drop box in Foggy Bottom.
The Trump administration has long touted the idea that large numbers of noncitizens unlawfully cast ballots in US elections but has not produced any evidence suggesting that the problem exists at a scale that would have affected the result of any election, anywhere in the country. Multiple research studies, including from the Fair Elections Center, Bipartisan Policy Center, Brennan Center, and the Cato Institute, have found no evidence of mass voting by noncitizens and concluded that the problem is insignificant in electoral outcomes.
ProPublica found that federal immigration officers have detained at least 500 US citizens since the start of Trump’s second term, including 36 incidents in which detained US citizens were prevented from contacting their family or lawyers for 24 hours or more. The same study also found that agents who questioned their claims of citizenship detained more than 100 US citizens, nearly all of them people of color.
In Minnesota, Human Rights Watch found that ICE’s Operation Metro Surge abuses terrified many people, causing them to stay home and miss work, school, and even essential health care appointments. US citizens of color whom Human Rights Watch interviewed at the time said they were so fearful of racial profiling that they began carrying their passports everywhere.
Human Rights Watch analysis also suggests that in 2025, ICE used race and ethnicity in Los Angeles as a crude proxy for identifying a person’s nationality, and detained people on that basis. Perceptions of the risks associated with an encounter with ICE may well be higher among non-white communities.
The notoriety of those incidents and of ICE’s widespread abuses over the last two years risks dissuading some people from voting if they feel they are likely to encounter ICE agents near polling places, Human Rights Watch said.
“ICE agents should be publicly ordered to stay away from the polls and anywhere ballots are being cast,” Bolopion said.