President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon suggested on his War Room podcast this week that the Trump Administration should send Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling places during this year’s midterm elections. “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said.
During a press briefing with reporters on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she has not heard President Donald Trump consider deploying immigration agents to polling sites, but she refused to rule it out.
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“That’s not something I’ve ever heard the president consider, no,” Leavitt said.
When a reporter asked Leavitt if she could guarantee the American public that immigration agents won’t be around voting locations, Leavitt said: “I can’t guarantee an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November—I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the President discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”
President Trump has repeatedly spread false claims that large numbers of non-citizens voted illegally in presidential elections and that widespread voter fraud led to his 2020 election loss. Trump said on Monday that Republicans should “take over the voting in at least — many, 15 places” and “nationalize the voting.” Doing so would violate the Constitution which requires elections be run by states and counties, a system that was designed to avoid having a sitting President influence the outcome.
Last week, FBI agents, along with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, entered Fulton County, Georgia election facilities with a search warrant and seized ballots from the November 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Election experts and Democratic lawmakers have pointed to recent comments from Trump and his allies, as well as the scenes playing out in places like Minneapolis and Georgia, to raise concerns about the Administration deploying armed federal officials to shape the election results.
Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, voiced that concern in an interview on The Contrarian podcast on Wednesday, saying he was “greatly afraid” that “those ICE roving vans be used to try to go and intimidate voters at the polling station.”