ICE So Desperate To Conceal Polling Place Plans They're Disobeying Court Orders
ICE turned over a trove of already public, useless documents in "compliance" with a court order demanding documentation of their plans to stake out polling places across the US.
Midterm elections are rapidly approaching and, frankly, the Trump Administration knows it’s fucked.
As the notion of a deployment of ICE agents to polling places across the country began to grow in validity, Democrats demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement produce records of their plans — documents that Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys have already admitted they likely have thousands of.
Yet here we are, nearly ten months out from the initiation of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee, and all ICE has done is troll a judge’s court order by handing over a few hundred pages of press clippings that were already public.
Last month, in connection with the DNC’s FOIA lawsuit, Judge Beryl A. Howell issued an order against ICE, demanding that they produce at least 1,000 pages per month. ICE turned over 576 pages of absolutely useless and already publicly accessible bullshit, consisting of press clippings compiled for Homeland Security’s “daily briefing.”
In a joint status report submitted to the court following the press clippings fiasco, the DNC says ICE’s actions have explicitly “circumvented the court’s orders” and accuses the agency of intentionally hiding its polling place plans from the American public.
In fact, the DNC pointed to the specific language included in its FOIA request that specifically asks Immigration and Customs Enforcement to exclude any stand-alone news articles, press clippings, and publicly available materials that do not contain actual discussions by officials within the agency when complying with the request.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Vaden told the court in response to the DNC’s accusations that he was calling “ICE’s attention to the proviso”; however, he vehemently rejected the DNC’s claim that ICE is “queuing… nonresponsive documents before responsive ones” in order to keep its plans shielded.
Both Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin have repeatedly made public statements expressing their openness to and support for deploying ICE agents to polling places. Both officials have maintained that agents would only be utilized to assist local law enforcement, should a security threat arise, with Mullin comparing their presence to a TSA checkpoint, while emphatically insisting that agents would not be involved in voter identification or the verification of immigration status — while simultaneously doubling down on their vicious assertions that only American citizens should and can vote.
Nevertheless, ICE has viciously pushed back on any efforts to publicly uncover any internal plans or discussions with regard to their potential presence at US polling places.
The DNC’s original FOIA request took place in October 2025. By July 13, 2026, Judge Howell was forced to issue a court order against the immigration agency, noting that the midterm elections were less than four months away and ICE had yet to produce even “a single page of responsive materials.” ICE’s unwillingness to comply with the FOIA request led Howell to issue the July 13th court order, demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “immediately begin processing” responsive materials “at a rate of at least 1,000 pages per month, including the month of July.”
ICE failed to meet even that simple deadline, with the agency granting itself an additional week to meet Howell’s monthly quota, informing the court that the agency was setting a new deadline of August 7 “so as to include a greater number of responsive, non-exempt records” in its first production — only to turn over a first batch of documents that were resoundingly and, let’s face it, purposefully useless.
This fiasco comes after ICE had initially responded to the DNC in early June, claiming that they did not have any responsive records related to their FOIA request. This prompted Democrats to openly accuse the immigration agency of a “remarkable lack of diligence.” The DNC cited multiple news reports that covered the presence of ICE agents at polling places in both Texas and California amid the states’ primary elections in May and June, as well as Mullin’s own words during his sworn testimony at his Senate confirmation hearing.
In a court filing calling the Trump government out on its bullshit, DNC lawyers blistered, “Shockingly, ICE agents also entered an active polling place in New York to confront a poll worker over a month-old Instagram post addressing the killing of Renee Good.”
The Trump federal government is desperately trying to convince you that this country has a problem that only they have the solution for. But the reality is simply this — they do not want you to vote in a free and fair election, because they know they cannot win in a free and fair election. ICE is currently the single most terrifying entity in this nation, and they know it. There is only one reason the federal government would want them at your polling places, and it’s damn sure not to keep you safe.