By Mike Ludwig
This article was originally published by Truthout
A judge ordered Homeland Security to stop sending agents door to door in nine key states to hunt for “voter fraud.”
The Trump administration is attempting to intimidate Latino voters and naturalized citizens with the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests ahead of the midterm elections, democracy advocates are warning.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, has deployed federal agents in multiple states to knock on doors and demand voters verify their identities and registration as part of an “Unlawful Voter Initiative” launched in August. In response to a lawsuit filed on October 19 by labor and voting rights groups, a federal judge in California ruled the DHS initiative violates the Voting Rights Act and ordered federal agents to halt “elections-related field operations and field interviews” in California, Wisconsin, New York, Missouri, Connecticut, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
“I look at this list of states, and I can think of some high-profile races that may be anticipated to be close in a lot of those jurisdictions,” said David Janovsky, senior policy analyst and acting director of the Constitution Project at the Project On Government Oversight, in an interview. “So, I think there is a reasonable question in all of this about how the federal government is choosing to focus these efforts, and the motivation that is behind that.”
Critical contests in these states include the tight race between Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia, which could decide which party has a majority in the Senate. In California, New York, and beyond, multiple races could help to determine control of the House or pad a Democratic majority.
Feds Investigate Voters, Non-Profit Groups
Janovsky said sending agents door-to-door in states where Republicans face headwinds could suppress turnout. Indeed, since the 2024 election, polls suggest that Latinos and many other voters turned against the GOP as ICE invaded major cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, causing chaos, fear, and death.
By deploying federal immigration agents to go door-to-door hunting for so-called “voter fraud” ahead of Election Day, the Trump administration may also be preparing the ground for meddling with election results and suppressing dissent if Republicans perform poorly and lose their congressional majority.
With billions of dollars in funding from Congress, the Trump administration has transformed ICE into a powerful tool of intimidation. ICE agents have injured and killed people in multiple high-profile cases since Donald Trump took office again. Under Trump’s mass deportation campaign, ICE has detained at least 506 U.S. citizens as well as many legal permanent residents. People arrested by ICE are often jailed in facilities where dozens have died amid complaints of medical neglect, including a lawful permanent resident who was found dead in a Texas ICE jail last week.
Trump’s Justice Department has been trying for over a year to get voter rolls from every state and hand them over to DHS investigators searching for evidence of widespread fraud that experts say does not exist. DHS uses voter data to create “target lists” of potentially fraudulent voter registrations, according to Wednesday’s court order.
“With Homeland Security agents knocking on people’s doors asking them if they are properly registered to vote, there is a very real concern, and it’s pretty well known, that the federal government doesn’t have accurate data,” Janovsky said. “It could freak people out, like, ‘maybe I don’t want to register to vote and put myself on this list.’”
Under an executive order issued in May 2025, the Department of Justice demanded voter rolls from states to share with DHS so agents could scour for non-citizens attempting to vote, which is exceedingly rare. States run elections, not the federal government, but many red states handed voter data over voluntarily. Another 26 states, including those named in Wednesday’s order, saw lawsuits filed by the Justice Department over voter rolls dismissed by federal courts.
“That effort has largely been rejected by the courts, because basically the federal government has no real business micromanaging every state’s voter rolls,” Janovsky said.
Unable to force states to hand over voter data, DHS gathered more than 48 million voter records through independent and commercial sources “of questionable provenance” in order to search for potential fraud, according to Wednesday’s ruling. DHS records obtained by Democracy Forward under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) link these efforts to Heather Honey, a prominent 2020 election denier who has supplied Trump with conspiracy theories and is currently serving as a senior advisor to DHS and ICE.
The FOIA records also reveal that the Trump administration considered sending undercover agents to investigate pro-democracy groups that register people to vote, particularly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Critically, the court order halting the DHS door-knocking initiative highlights the significant likelihood that such investigations would result in errors and the misidentification of citizens as non-citizens, potentially preventing them from voting, according to Elizabeth Laird, director of equity at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
“This decision continues to establish the legal basis that it is not only unethical but illegal to weaponize personal data in ways that lead to irreparable harm to individuals who are wrongly targeted,” Laird said in a statement on Thursday.
While Laird said the initial ruling is a promising step forward, the case underscores the “significant dangers” of the Trump administration’s “ongoing efforts to compile and weaponize personal information from across federal and state agencies.”
“That is the high-level problem,” Janovsky said of the administration’s exploitation of voter data. “Then you have these targeted enforcement operations happening in a handful of states, including California.”
ICE and DOJ Ramp Up Arrests
California may be a testing ground of sorts, Janovsky said. Immigrant advocates have confirmed a rapid increase of ICE arrests in the Central Valley and beyond, with more than 100 farmworkers arrested last week alone. As California’s KQED reports, fear and rumors spread whenever ICE conducts large enforcement operations. People stay home as a result, causing Latino businesses to suffer, schoolchildren to miss classes, and patients to forgo seeing the doctors.
Advocates warn the Trump administration is betting that ICE could keep Latino voters away from the polls as well, but Democratic California Rep. Lateefah Simon says the intimidation campaign will not work. Indeed, election officials are seeing a surge of interest in early voting, with 21 million people casting early ballots as of Friday morning, NPR reports.
“We know what Republicans are trying to do — intimidate Latino citizens so they stay at home and don’t exercise their right to vote,” said Simon in a statement to local media on October 16.
Activists are preparing for the potential deployment of ICE agents to the polls, which Trump officials have said is not a priority but also could not be ruled out. In Arizona, the grassroots LUCHA coalition has trained hundreds of volunteer “constitutional defenders” to respond to federal intimidation if it were to occur on Election Day, according to communications director César Fierros.
“Masked agents in tactical gear threatening people in line or attempting to raid polling locations would be an assault on democracy itself, and it’s the greatest threat facing our nation,” Fierros told Truthout in an email. “We are preparing, but hoping for the best.”
On Monday, the Justice Department announced it was charging 28 non-citizens in California with election crimes, a development Janovsky is watching closely. On October 15, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California that asks a federal court to order California officials to stop processing ballots from thousands of people the Trump administration identifies as “likely non-citizens.”
Before filing the lawsuit, federal officials delivered a flash drive to Los Angeles County that contained 20,000 names and a 48-hour deadline to investigate them for fraudulent voter registrations. When local and state officials refused to do so, citing security concerns and potentially faulty data, Trump wrote online that, “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
The administration’s data has already proven to be faulty in the neighboring state of Nevada, where DHS officials recently claimed to have identified nearly 16,000 non-citizens registered to vote on state rolls. However, that number fell to 185 after further inquiry, and then to zero after state officials confirmed that those individuals were all U.S. citizens.
While Janovsky said the circumstances surrounding the charges of election crimes against 28 individuals are unclear, the Trump administration has consistently claimed to be fighting widespread voter fraud that does not exist — but such enforcement backs up bogus claims about fraud that Trump has made since losing the 2020 election.
“It’s entirely possible that some of these folks are citizens who were properly registered to vote and the feds have bad data — and that is the basis for the court injunction issued on Wednesday,” Janovsky said.
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