DHS Secretary Mullin says ICE could deploy to polling sites on warrants

DHS separately told Politico ICE is not targeting polling sites

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Tuesday that federal immigration officers could be deployed to polling places across the country to serve an arrest warrant or respond to a threat at a polling site, on the same topic that Democrats and voting-rights groups have warned about ahead of the November midterm elections.

Mullin made the comments to reporters in New York. “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats,” he said. He added: “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. 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 Department of Homeland Security 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 reported that it contacted DHS for additional comment.

Mullin’s comments came the same week that Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to Senator Elissa Slotkin that the U.S. military has no plans to deploy troops to polling sites during the November elections. “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,” Caine wrote. He added that there were “no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material.”

Caine’s letter responded to a request from Slotkin, who has expressed concerns that the Trump administration could send military personnel to patrol polling sites.

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. “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. He added: “If states want the grant funding, to recap, they must secure the election.”

Voting-rights experts have said the administration has not provided evidence for its claims of widespread noncitizen voting. In one instance, DHS officials said there may have been as many as 16,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada, but later confirmed that only 185 of those people were actually noncitizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian.

Donald Trump has declined to rule out deploying federal agents to polling locations while continuing to raise questions about the integrity of past elections.