Can ICE agents be stationed at polling places?
Federal law has been clear since the Civil War: The government cannot deploy any person in the service of the United States to a polling place unless it is “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”
Federal officials have denied they have any plans to send immigration enforcement agents to polling places. “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats,” Markwayne Mullin, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters in September. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down.”
Mullin recently threatened to imprison election officials who did not comply with DHS directives.
“While I appreciate people’s concern, I haven’t heard anything that’d make me nervous,” said Bluestein, a Republican.
Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler, a Democrat, agreed. “I think ICE is the one that gets all the attention, but I’m concerned about the president messing with the mail,” he said.
“There’s things on the back end with the counting that I’m more concerned about than polling place intimidation,” Ceisler added. “We are prepared for whatever.”
With no reports of concrete plans for federal police deployments, Ceisler said, it’s safe to relax a bit.
“The Trump administration — he can’t have a Diet Coke without it getting leaked. For there to be a deployment of federal resources, this needs to get planned. … Operations orders, they would get leaked,” Ceisler said.