ICE Is Already Impacting Elections — Even If They Don’t Show Up At The Polls

There was a lot to worry about before Minnesota State Rep. Meg Luger-Nikolai romped to victory in the Jan. 27 special election to fill a vacant St. Paul state legislative seat. Her district, like neighboring Minneapolis, faced a brutal occupation by more than 3,000 federal officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol. Those officers had killed two residents of the Twin Cities and brutalized countless citizens and non-citizens alike.

The brutal crackdown on Minneapolis-St. Paul and comments from the Trump administration and its allies in right-wing media and Congress had raised serious concerns that ICE would be used to disrupt elections by policing or surrounding polling places.

“We were quite concerned about it, particularly for her race,” Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said about Luger-Nikolai.

Those fears have only grown as Trump’s allies leveled threats to use ICE around the polls.

“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said on his podcast on Feb. 4.

GOP lawmakers, like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), have said there is nothing wrong with ICE appearing at the polls to question voters.

But, in Minnesota last month, those fears and threats didn’t materialize. Or at least not in the way that some had worried.

“The good thing is there weren’t any reports of ICE near the polls,” Luger-Nikolai said. “That part was OK.” But that doesn’t mean everything was anywhere near normal.

While the worst fear didn’t materialize, Minnesota’s experience hosting elections under the most extreme ICE crackdown seen to date provides lessons on how such an oppressive operation can significantly undermine the basic functions of elections and democracy.

Luger-Nikolai’s special election campaign started off normally as she won her party’s primary in December. But as Trump’s Operation Metro Surge ramped up and became more and more violent, she and the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had to change tactics.

“After the winter break coming into January, we realized that door-knocking was a really bad idea,” Luger-Nikolai said.

Thanks to a crucial Supreme Court decision on its shadow docket that authorized immigration officers to racially profile people they thought might be undocumented, Operation Metro Surge saw officers target anyone — citizen or not — who wasn’t white for questioning, detention or, in many cases, brutal treatment. ICE began going door-to-door in predominantly minority neighborhoods to ask where residents were born, sometimes dragging them out of their homes at gunpoint. Officers indiscriminately fired pepper spray and tear gas at residents, including into the car of a family, hospitalizing a baby.

“What that did was have an incredibly chilling effect on how people move about our communities,” said Richard Carlbom, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “There are U.S. citizens who are Black, brown or Asian who won’t leave their house and we have to deliver food to them on a weekly basis because they’re afraid of being detained.”

These fears meant the party had to change tactics and limit how it ran its voter contact and get-out-the-vote operations. At first, Luger-Nikolai’s campaign stopped knocking on doors at single-family homes to avoid frightening anyone whom they could not contact ahead of time. Instead, they focused on apartments where they could coordinate with superintendents and other building caretakers to inform residents when door-knockers would be in the building, alleviating fears.

But then on Jan. 7, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year old mother, who had been acting as an observer of ICE enforcement operations. Then, even that line of contact dried up.

“After Renee Good was murdered and things started to escalate we started getting notes from caretakers that said, ‘We will let you into the building, but I wouldn’t recommend it,’” Luger-Nikolai said. “They were hearing from residents that they were freaked out.”

That meant her campaign had to rely on phone-banking and leaving campaign literature at buildings without making voter contact. This was a “suboptimal” way to run a campaign, Luger-Nikolai said, noting that door-knocking is the number one way to contact voters to inform them about her candidacy and get them out to vote.

“It’s not how I would have liked to have run a campaign,” she added. “It was a little bit reminiscent of 2020,” when the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed traditional political campaigning.

Fears about strangers knocking on doors also varied by the residents’ race or ethnicity. It wasn’t the predominantly white communities who feared a knock on the door, according to Luger-Nikolai. It was the diverse Latino, Black, Somali and Asian communities who feared that any knock on the door could end with questioning from immigration officers, a gun pointed in their face or worse.

What this experience shows is that even absent ICE surrounding the polls , Trump’s immigration enforcement operations spread enough fear and chaos to terrorize minority communities and significantly transform how campaigns are run. Considering that Black, Latino and Asian communities are major parts of the Democratic Party coalition, instilling fear in them could suppress their votes and aid Republicans.

It is still illegal under multiple federal and state laws for federal officers to interfere with elections or even be near polling locations. But the administration is trying to wiggle out of these laws ahead of the 2026 midterms: Since returning to power in 2025, President Donald Trump has governed as an authoritarian, with an unconcealed disdain for dissent and democratic elections that could undermine his pursuit of total power.

Concerns about ICE as a party to any attempt by Trump to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections first emerged late last year, when Trump launched immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles and Chicago and then sent, or threatened to send, National Guard troops to back up those operations. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, both Democrats, argued that these operations weren’t just about deporting undocumented immigrants, but instead a preview for using armed federal agents or troops to seize control of elections. Congressional Democrats have increasingly pointed to the potential threat ICE could pose to elections as the chaos in Minnesota escalated.

The White House has said that deploying ICE agents around elections was not under consideration but did not rule it out.

“That’s not something I’ve ever heard the president consider, no,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week in response to a question about Bannon’s comments. But, she added, “I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November.”

Even if there is an effort to suppress the vote, in November’s elections or any others, that still doesn’t mean it is guaranteed to be effective. Luger-Nikolai’s special election win was the largest by any Democrat running in a special election over the past year, albeit in a very safe seat. And a week later, still under ICE/CBP occupation, the state party held its precinct caucuses across the state and saw record turnout with more than 35,000 people showing up.

The party had, however, prepared in advance: It had trained 9,000 observers and had lawyers ready to intervene in case of any problems with ICE at the caucuses.

The party’s electoral successes and party enthusiasm show that Trump’s attempts to suppress the vote and tear apart their communities may be having the opposite impact. That is evident in the rise of the dispersed community networks that rose up in Minnesota to document ICE everywhere they went, to challenge every arrest and attempted deportation in court and to provide mutual aid to people too afraid to leave their homes.

Instead of shrinking in fear or turning inwards and away from their neighbors, residents bonded together to fight back. And those networks could become very powerful in helping to overcome whatever Trump tries next.

Aside from tracking any effort to interfere with the polls in November, Carlbom believes “that these networks will be activating voters, driving voters to the polls, making sure that voters have what they need,” he said. ”And, ultimately, making sure that as many voters as possible demonstrate to Republicans in this state that when you stood with Donald Trump and you didn’t stand with us, we won’t forget that.”