The city of Denver and a coalition of advocacy groups asked a federal judge on Thursday to prohibit the Trump administration from deploying federal immigration agents to polling sites ahead of the November midterm elections.
The first-of-its-kind lawsuit asserts that allowing federal agents to serve warrants at polling locations violates federal laws that protect free elections. The filers asked the district court in Washington D.C. to prohibit federal officers from carrying weapons near voting locations or other polling sites, as well.
“It disrupts voting and makes it more difficult for state and local election officials and law enforcement to do their jobs by making polling places spaces of confrontation,” the lawsuit says.
The left-leaning groups Democracy Forward and the Public Rights Project filed the lawsuit alongside Denver, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause and Unidos US. The lawsuit specifically names Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and David Venturella, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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The Trump administration has not announced concrete plans for these kinds of deployments, but the lawsuit contends such a policy is coming down the pike.
In a statement on Thursday, Democracy Forward said that the policy was “confirmed and clarified” by Mullin “when he said that ICE officers could enter polling places to serve warrants or conduct other immigration and customs enforcement activity.”
The lawsuit specifically says that ICE agents entered a polling site in Syracuse, New York, in June to interview an election volunteer about a social media post, and in another case, agents “swarmed” the parking lot of a polling site in San Antonio to arrest a person there.
Mullin told reporters earlier this month that “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” but said that federal agents could be deployed in the case of a “threat” or to serve a specific warrant.
The lawsuit comes as early voting is set to begin in states across the country later this month with only weeks until the Nov. 3 elections.
Federal law bans military personnel or “armed” agents from election sites “unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Sun.
“ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” DHS wrote in a statement Thursday afternoon. “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.”
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