Sending armed ICE agents to polling places would be a federal crime, lawsuit says

Two major Latino civil rights groups, a voting rights organization, and the city of Denver sued the Trump administration on Thursday to keep armed immigration enforcement agents away from polling places, invoking a Civil War-era criminal law that generally prohibits federal officials from bringing “troops or armed men” to places where elections are held.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., comes eight days before in-person early voting begins in some states, such as Minnesota and South Dakota. It asks a judge to declare it unlawful for the administration to send armed agents to polling sites.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a Sept. 1 news conference in New York that ICE agents would not patrol polling places, but that they would go to one if there were a threat there or if they were serving a warrant on someone they had been tracking. “If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be,” he said.

DHS has said in statements to media following Mullin’s comments that it “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but added that people could be arrested at a polling place if an active public safety threat arose there.

Democratic lawmakers and election officials have grown increasingly worried in recent months that armed federal officers or troops could be sent to polling sites. Local officials in states such as Arizona and Minnesota have gone as far as preparing emergency court filings and training personnel on how to respond.

Those fears have been fueled by calls among some allies of President Donald Trump — including at least three Republican gubernatorial candidates in different states — for sending armed federal agents and the National Guard to voting sites.

The lawsuit cites a year of public comments by Trump administration officials and allies. In February, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” Days later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters she “can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location.” And in March, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is now attorney general, asked at a conservative gathering, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?”

The plaintiffs argue that pattern, capped by Mullin’s recent remarks, amount to a policy and plan by the administration.

The lawsuit Thursday was filed on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, UnidosUS, Common Cause, and the city and county of Denver.

It relies on an 1865 law that makes it a felony for any federal official to order “troops or armed men” to places where an election is held, unless the force is needed to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” Violators face up to five years in prison and disqualification from holding federal office. In 1909, Congress removed the law’s other exception — allowing armed men to “keep the peace at the polls.”

The plaintiffs argue that armed federal agents at polling places would intimidate voters — particularly Latinos and naturalized U.S. citizens — and could turn voting sites into places of confrontation.

“The right to vote is foundational to our democracy and yet this administration continues in its endless attempts to weaken the very institutions it is entrusted to protect,” said Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC. “The outcomes of elections define the future for all of us, and in America, voters should be able to cast their ballots without fear of intimidation by armed ICE officers at polling places.”

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The military has drawn a clearer line. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D, Mich.) in an Aug. 28 letter that the Joint Force “has no plans” to send federal troops or federalized National Guard members to polling places, or to use them to seize ballots or voting machines.

“I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections,” Caine wrote.

Trump has made sweeping claims of election fraud without evidence, alleging that large numbers of unauthorized immigrants will vote in November absent federal intervention. In March he signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to restrict how mail ballots are handled and instructing DHS to build lists of U.S. citizens and share them with states. The Supreme Court allowed parts of the order to move forward last month, and the administration returned to the Supreme Court this week for a third time after a federal judge in Boston blocked the Postal Service rule.

The lawsuit invoked an 1865 law advanced by then-Democratic lawmakers angered by the Lincoln administration’s deployment of Union troops interfering in presidential elections in Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, according to legal historians.

That statute has never been tested, said University of Houston law school professor Chris Mirasola. No court has interpreted what counts as a place where an election is held, according to a Brennan Center for Justice analysis published in July, leaving unanswered whether the law reaches ballot drop boxes, election offices, and counting facilities as well as polling sites.

“The statute is incredibly old, and there is no case law about it, so all of this is going to be before the courts for the first time,” he said. “That always leaves questions about how it’s going to be interpreted.”

The plaintiffs, represented by attorneys with Democracy Forward, argue Congress explicitly banned armed federal officers from election sites to “provide and preserve free and fair elections, the rule of law, the right to vote, and Americans’ confidence in the sanctity of the ballot box.”

DHS’s “disregard for that statutory framework threatens our upcoming election,” the complaint said.

Mirasola said the law was a reaction to multiple instances of Union soldiers detaining Confederate-aligned candidates and blocking voters with ballots favoring those candidates during the wartime election in border states. Though the bill authors at the time were in the throes of a specific armed conflict, the rhetoric of the congressional debates were just as contemporary then as they are now, Marisola said. Lawmakers were hyper-focused on preserving the integrity of the electoral system.

“This lawsuit is alleging that what we are seeing in the lead-up to the midterms is the same kind of election interference because the administration has been dangling the possibility that there might be a deployment of armed federal agents,” Mirasola said.

The only exception for armed officers that has withstood time is in order to “repel armed enemies” of the United States. Lawmakers in the 1860s imagined those being Confederate soldiers. But the Trump administration could try to make a narrow argument identifying a different enemy, Mirasola said.

Plaintiffs will face another obstacle, according to Mirasola. The U.S. Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the avenues for the federal courts to issue prospective nationwide injunctions.

The complaint cited Justice Department actions to remove a manual explicitly stating the long-standing position of the government that armed federal agents are prohibited from election sites. They also pointed to the gutting of the department’s public integrity section, which wrote the document and advised law enforcement on legal matters during elections.

The complaint also points to three encounters involving immigration officers at voting sites during this year’s primaries: ICE officers converging on a traffic stop outside a San Antonio early voting site, where the county sheriff told them to leave; ICE vehicles outside a vote center in Simi Valley, California; and two federal agents entering a Syracuse, New York, library to warn a poll worker about an Instagram post naming the ICE agent who fatally shot Renée Good in Minneapolis.

LULAC, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization, has registered and mobilized Hispanic communities to the polls for nearly a century. Its hundreds of thousands of members have communicated worries that any federal presence could dampen turnout and fuel fears of racial profiling.

LULAC pointed to reporting by ProPublica, which found that immigration agents had detained more than 170 U.S. citizens, including more than 50 — nearly all of them Latino — who were held after agents questioned their citizenship.

Election workers across the country have been preparing for months. Some are being trained on de-escalation techniques in case of run-ins with federal agents and what hotlines to call to report potential disturbances.

In Denver, the clerk and recorder is already preparing to retrain the election judges who check in voters and empty the city’s 48 ballot drop boxes. The training covers how to de-escalate an encounter with federal agents, how to document what they do, and how to identify agents who are in plainclothes, according to the complaint. Election officials are also drawing up contingency plans to move voters to alternative polling sites.

The election judges are temporary workers, and Denver says it struggles to recruit enough of them for every election. Some, the city told the court, may now decline the job altogether.

“Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement. “We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”