Trump homeland security chief says ICE agents could be sent to polling places

The US homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, on Tuesday said that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers could be deployed to polling sites across the country.

Speaking to reporters in New York, Mullin said: “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.”

For months, Democrats and voting rights groups have warned that the Trump administration might attempt to deploy federal agents to polling locations in an effort to intimidate voters and depress turnout ahead of the November midterm elections.

Although the White House has downplayed such suggestions, Donald Trump has declined to rule it out while continuing to sow doubt about the integrity of past – and future – US elections.

“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 said. “ICE’s job is immigration, customs enforcement. That’s their job … if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”

Federal law prohibits military personnel or other “armed” agents from being “at any place where a general or special election is held”.

In a separate statement to Politico, the homeland security department said: “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations. ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.”

The Guardian has contacted the DHS for additional comment.

Mullin’s latest comments follow statements he made in July, when he threatened to withhold federal aid from states that refused to comply with homeland security election directives as part of the administration’s crackdown on what it alleges is widespread voter fraud.

“We will scrub all election records, looking for illegal aliens and those who are ineligible to vote, including those that somehow voted, yet they were deceased,” Mullin said earlier this summer, adding: “If states want the grant funding, to recap, they must secure the election.”

Yet experts say the administration has failed to offer any proof for its claims of non-citizen voting. In one instance, the DHS officials claimed that there may have been as many as 16,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Nevada, but later admitted they could confirm that only 185 of those people were actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian.

Meanwhile, Dan Caine, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, recently wrote in a letter that the US military had no plans to deploy troops to polling sites during the upcoming November midterm elections.

Caine’s letter came in response to a request for information from Senator Elissa Slotkin amid concerns that the Trump administration could send US military personnel to patrol polling sites.

In his letter to Slotkin, Caine said: “The joint force has no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized members of the national guard to polling places during the 2026 elections.” He added that there were “no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material”.