Two federal lawsuits seek to keep armed agents away from polling places as early voting begins

Voters in Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota began casting in-person ballots on Friday for the November 3 midterm elections, the first states to open early voting in a cycle already shadowed by disputes over whether armed federal agents will show up at the polls. Hours after voting opened, a coalition of civil rights groups and labor unions filed a federal lawsuit in Washington seeking to stop the Trump administration from stationing immigration officers at voting sites, the second such suit in eight days.

The new complaint, brought by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund on behalf of nine organizations including the NAACP, Mi Familia en Acción, OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates and four national unions, asks a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to bar the government from "deploying agents in a manner that unlawfully intimidates voters," according to reporting on the filing. It follows a suit filed September 10 by the legal group Democracy Forward on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause, UnidosUS and the city and county of Denver, which raised nearly identical claims in the same courthouse.

Both lawsuits rest on a single, rarely invoked provision of federal law: 18 U.S.C. § 592, a statute dating to the Civil War era that makes it a crime for any officer or employee of the federal government to bring or keep "troops or armed men" at a place where a general or special election is being held. The only exception is force "necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States." A violation carries a fine, up to five years in prison and disqualification from holding federal office.

The numbers

The dispute is landing amid measurable erosion in public confidence about the vote count itself. A survey of 11,406 eligible voters conducted by the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections at the University of California San Diego, with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.9 percentage points, found that overall confidence votes will be accurately counted in the midterms has fallen to 60 percent, down 17 points from 77 percent after the 2024 election. The decline cut across party lines: 17 points among Republicans, 16 among independents and 13 among Democrats, according to the university's own summary of the findings, published by UC San Diego.

On the specific question of immigration enforcement at the polls, 37 percent of respondents said they expect ICE officers to be present at their voting location this cycle. That expectation was far higher among voters of color: 45 percent of Hispanic respondents, 44 percent of Black respondents and 41 percent of Asian American respondents, compared with 33 percent of white respondents. Nearly a third of Hispanic and Asian American respondents said they worry that going to the polls could put them at risk of being questioned by federal immigration officers despite being U.S. citizens.

How the dispute reached the courts

The immediate trigger for both lawsuits was a September 1 news conference in New York at which Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers could appear at a polling place if there were "a threat to that polling place" or if agents were serving a warrant on someone "that we have been actively tracking down." Mullin added that "ICE isn't there to patrol the polling places," while border czar Tom Homan separately said agents would not "sweep" voting sites. The department has also said in statements to reporters that ICE "is not planning operations targeting polling locations" and that its work amounts to "intelligence-driven targeted enforcement," while leaving open the possibility of arrests if officers determine an "active public safety threat" exists at a polling location.

Plaintiffs argue those carve-outs are precisely what the 1948-codified statute was written to close off, and they point to a string of incidents during this year's primary elections, including immigration enforcement activity reported near polling locations in San Antonio, in Ventura County, California, and in Syracuse, New York, as evidence the administration's stated limits have not held in practice. The concern is not new inside Congress. During Mullin's confirmation hearing in March, Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan pressed him specifically on "concerns about President Trump sending federal law enforcement to polling places in the 2026 election," part of what her office describes as a broader push to obtain written assurances from the Justice Department, DHS, the FBI and the National Guard that no federal force would be present at voting sites this fall.

Who is affected

The practical stakes fall first on Denver, the only city government to join either suit directly, and on voters in immigrant and mixed-status communities who told UC San Diego researchers they were weighing whether the risk of encountering federal agents might keep them from the polls. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, whose city is a plaintiff in the first suit, framed the dispute in stark terms.

"Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes," Johnston said, according to the Colorado Sun.

Election administrators are also directly implicated. Denver's elected clerk and recorder, Paul López, has said publicly that any agents who showed up at a Denver polling place attempting to make arrests should expect to be taken into custody themselves under the same statute. Bethany Li, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the pattern the groups are challenging "mirrors" tactics used to intimidate voters of color during the civil rights era, and Héctor Sánchez Barba, president of Mi Familia en Acción, urged voters instead to make a plan to cast a ballot despite the uncertainty. A DHS spokesperson has maintained the agency's enforcement posture is lawful and unrelated to voter suppression, and officials have separately said that any noncitizen found to have voted illegally, a practice audits have repeatedly found to be rare, will still face prosecution regardless of what language a jurisdiction's ballots are printed in.

What happens next

Both cases are moving on an unusually compressed timetable. With early in-person voting now open in Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota and additional states, including Illinois on September 24, set to follow through late October, courts in Washington will be under pressure to rule before most of the country has finished voting ahead of the November 3 election. Judges in the District of Columbia will need to weigh the century-and-a-half-old statute's plain language against the administration's contention that its enforcement guidance already keeps officers away from voting sites in all but narrow circumstances.

Both lawsuits name the Department of Homeland Security and, in the newer filing, President Trump, and both remain pending with no hearing dates yet set. DHS has not signaled whether it will seek to combine its defense of the two cases, and it continued this week to describe its enforcement posture as targeted rather than location-based, pointing to the September 1 remarks by Secretary Mullin as its clearest public statement of policy. How the two lawsuits are resolved, separately or together, is likely to determine how visible federal law enforcement is at polling places for the balance of the midterm cycle.