The White House on Thursday said President Donald Trump has not raised any "formal plans" to deploy U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations for the November midterm elections, though it stopped short of ruling out ICE personnel being near polling sites.
Earlier in the week, the president urged Republicans to "nationalize" and "take over" voting in at least 15 unspecified locations, repeating assertions that U.S. elections are affected by broad fraud. Those remarks were reiterated by Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to the president and prominent right-wing commentator, who on his War Room podcast on Tuesday declared, "You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November."
Asked directly about Bannon’s comments, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: "I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November … but what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations."
The public remarks underscore a tension between calls from some in the president’s orbit for heightened federal involvement in administering elections and legal constraints that limit certain kinds of federal deployment at polling sites. Federal law bars the deployment of military troops at any location holding a general or special election, and several states have criminalized carrying firearms at or near polling places.
Immigration enforcement in particular has been cited as a deterrent to participation in public life for some communities; it has caused both U.S. citizens and legal residents to avoid public interactions out of fear of detention or racial profiling, according to observers referenced in recent commentary.
Democrats have expressed alarm in recent months that the president might use federal forces to intimidate voters and interfere with the November contests that will determine control of Congress. At the same time, some Republican lawmakers have expressed reservations about the idea of nationalizing elections. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he is "not in favor of federalizing elections," while House Speaker Mike Johnson emphasized that "it’s always been the responsibility of the states to administer elections."
The president’s push for greater federal involvement in election administration comes amid intensified federal scrutiny of state voter rolls. The administration has increased pressure on many Democratic-led states to turn over voter data, and the Justice Department has sued nearly two dozen states over their voter rolls. In a related development, the FBI recently searched an election office in Georgia’s Fulton County for records tied to the 2020 election, as the president continues to press allegations of fraud in that contest.
What remains clear from the White House response is that while there are no documented, formal plans from the president to position ICE agents at polling locations, the possibility of agents appearing near polling sites has not been dismissed. The statements from senior White House officials and allied commentators have intensified scrutiny from lawmakers and civil rights observers, raising questions about how enforcement actions and federal requests for voter data may intersect with voter confidence and election administration ahead of November.