How ICE Is Targeting the 2026 Midterms
The New Yorker · Jonathan Blitzer ·
In the run-up to the election, the Trump Administration is turning its immigration crackdown into a desperate hunt for voter fraud, Jonathan Blitzer reports.
Rivera Galati, whose parents moved to Pennsylvania from Puerto Rico, was carrying her passport and birth certificate. “I’m a U.S. citizen, but I didn’t feel that way that day,” she told me. “I thought, I’m Hispanic.” There were now six S.U.V.s parked on the street outside her office. Another one rolled up slowly behind her. Rivera Galati believes the agents, who drove off when she got out of her car to confront them, were taking down her license-plate number. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been an unavoidable presence in the area during Donald Trump’s second term. But, lately, the unmarked S.U.V.s, widely recognized as the kind used by the agency, seemed to be multiplying. “As we got closer to the election, in the summer, is when it picked up,” Rivera Galati said. “They’re literally everywhere.” (“None of this ever happened,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told me, when asked for comment. “ICE doesn’t even have any white S.U.V.s in York, Pennsylvania.”)
In early June, Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, issued an internal report on noncitizen voting. The phenomenon is virtually nonexistent—research has repeatedly shown that isolated votes cast by noncitizens have never affected the outcome of an election—but the President has turned it into a pretext to involve the Department of Homeland Security in the midterms. The June report stated that there were efforts at multiple branches of the Department to identify organizations that “may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal alien registration and voter encouragement.” Groups in several states, including Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio, were being investigated, but two locations were sources of special interest: Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Department reviewed eighty-two N.G.O.s in Pennsylvania alone. We Are Casa is almost certainly one of them.
D.H.S.’s role in elections has, until recently, been limited to technical issues like monitoring cyberattacks and defending critical infrastructure. Its prominent place in this election cycle is without precedent. In the lead-up to the midterms, the Trump Administration has sued thirty states, along with the District of Columbia, which have refused to turn over complete voter records; D.H.S. wants to cross-check them with its own databases. Federal courts have mostly rebuffed these lawsuits. But hundreds of Department officials have been assigned to search for unlawful voters. Agents from H.S.I., together with personnel from the fraud division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, have been routinely contacting county boards of elections to request voter files.
Read the full story at The New Yorker · All coverage of this story