Armed federal agents are spending the days leading up to midterms going door to door asking people their immigration and voter registration status.
CBS News reported Wednesday that the draconian crackdown—a combination of President Trump’s mass deportation effort and his desperate attempt to manufacture proof of election fraud—was already underway in multiple states, having accelerated last month.
“HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CBS, using an acronym for Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations arm. “Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.”
This effort can be traced back to June, when DHS ordered ICE to specifically target noncitizens who were allegedly voting in elections. The department has claimed that there could be as many as 250,000 fraudulent voters—even though only 156 people have been charged thus far. And that 250,000 number is widely debated, as states say the federal government gave them lists of noncitizen voters riddled with inaccuracies.
The home visits have increased regardless. On Monday, DHS announced that they arrested 11 people in Los Angeles, all of them green card holders. One of those arrested, a 72-year-old Belizean man, said he had never voted and couldn’t remember having registered to vote.
This gestapo-level action was part of the plan all along, especially as Trump grasps for any possible way to suppress votes against him and his party in November. This will not only lead to unlawful arrests, but it will also have a chilling effect on legal voters who may be naturalized citizens, or who just happen to not be white.
“Once again, this has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Trump has turned DHS into his own federal police force,” former Biden immigration adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. “Whether he deploys them to find fraud, harass nonprofits, or question naturalized citizens, he keeps expanding the scope of their duties.”