Massive Groups of Volunteers Are Ready to Face Down ICE at the Polls

The Franklin County board of elections building at 1700 Morse Street in central Columbus, Ohio, is an early voting site for next week’s midterms. It is also located in the middle of the large Somali American community that was targeted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s Operation Buckeye last December. The campaign was designed, the agency said, to find “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”

The result was a paltry number of arrests, months of sustained harassment, and a lingering feeling that ICE agents could return at any minute, especially around election time.

“Here in central Ohio, our early voting location is located in a neighborhood that's been the hardest hit by ICE, and it's an immigrant community neighborhood,” Liliana Rivera Baiman, an organizer with the 614 ICE Watch group and the Ohio Good Neighbor Network, tells WIRED. “So we knew that that neighborhood was at risk and that people were going to be going to vote there, and a lot of the community there, like our Somali community that can vote, our Latino community, they walk to the location.”

Baiman’s group is responding to the threats from the Trump administration to target immigrant communities during the midterms. Dozens of volunteers are already patrolling near early voting sites in Columbus every day, Baiman says, and the figure will rise to around 250 on Election Day. They have been trained to document, record, and report any sightings of federal immigration agents, sharing the information in dozens of Signal and WhatsApp groups.

“We teach people that they have to observe the behavior. We show them what to look out for, what does ICE look like, this is the type of uniform that agents wear, these are the types of vehicles that they drive,” Baiman says. “We show them examples so that they can get familiar with what they might see.”

These efforts are being repeated in towns and cities across the country. WIRED spoke to a dozen people taking part in this effort, whose groups are working together to combat what they see as an existential threat to American democracy. Central to this response are training sessions run by massive national groups like Common Cause, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Indivisible, as well as local groups like Living United for Change in Arizona and NorCal Resist, that have created massive groups of people who can document and record what ICE is doing, understand voters rights, and in many cases, prepare for worst-case scenarios.

Officially, the Department of Homeland Security has said that it has no plans to deploy ICE agents to polling locations on Election Day. “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” a DHS spokesperson tells WIRED, but added: “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.”

ICE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

For the past six months, President Trump and his allies have declined to rule out possible deployments to voting locations during the midterms, even though they would be illegal under federal law. When asked in May if he would deploy the National Guard or ICE during the midterms, Trump said: “I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections. We have to have honest elections.”

“Why are there objections to sending ICE officers to polling places?” Todd Blanche, then acting attorney general, said in July. “Illegals can’t vote.”

Some election experts simply don’t believe it will happen: “ICE and troops will not be at the polls,” David Becker, a former Justice Department trial attorney who is now head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said at a recent media briefing. “It won't happen. If it happens at all, it will be isolated. It will be accidental. It just won't happen.”

But for organizations on the ground interacting with voters in communities that have been targeted by ICE during Trump’s second term in office, the reality feels very different. Hundreds of different groups are part of the fight against possible ICE intimidation at the polls, and they are all working in coordination with each other.

“I've been up and down this state, in and out of Reno, in and out of Las Vegas, into our rural counties, and the number one question I get is about federal agents at polling locations,” Cisco Aguilar, the Nevada secretary of state, tells WIRED.

Beatriz Lopez, the executive director of Voto Latino, a group encouraging Hispanic and Latino citizens to register to vote, agrees, particularly when it comes to the communities her organization is focused on.

“We know that Latino voters are in the crosshairs of this administration because we know our electorate, our voting bloc, is what's going to shape and determine the elections of so many competitive races,” Lopez tells WIRED. “There is legitimate fear among our community.”

Lopez’s group, like many others WIRED spoke to, will be operating a war room on Election Day, with the specific goal of identifying and debunking viral disinformation that could dissuade citizens from voting. But they are also preparing for more troubling, real-world concerns.

“One of the scenarios that we're anticipating is that at the same time that we're trying to get people out to vote, there might be home raids by ICE in some of these neighborhoods, which has a real chilling effect on people,” Lopez said.

To combat this scenario, groups like 614 ICE Watch in Columbus are organizing patrols in neighborhoods near polling locations. “We send our folks in pairs or in groups. We never want to send anyone alone; we always want to have multiple people there so they can help take control of the situation,” Baiman says, adding that they have trained volunteers in a unique method of de-escalation: “If it starts to get very tense, we teach our folks to hum, to sing, to calm themselves down.”

The goal is not to interact with ICE agents but to document what they are doing so that events can be properly recorded and shared publicly. In January, just days after Alex Pretti was shot and killed in Minneapolis, more than 200,000 people logged into an “Eyes on Ice” Zoom training session, designed to teach people how to properly document ICE activities. Those skills are now being deployed during the midterm elections, Ezra Levin, cofounder of Indivisible, a group founded to stop the rise of authoritarianism in the US, tells WIRED.

On a much smaller scale, Living United for Change in Arizona has been training volunteers to become “constitutional defenders” in person, as the group prepares for next week’s vote. To track ICE activity, the group created a heat map that volunteers use to log and track ICE activity. The map is not available publicly, but WIRED was given access to the website and reviewed hundreds of recorded incidents of ICE activity in Maricopa and Pima counties.

Groups are also using social media to draw attention to what is happening. Last week in Sutter County, California, six ICE vehicles showed up in the parking lot of the Yuba City board of elections building, where a ballot drop box is located. Following a call from a local resident, NorCal Resist, a mutual aid organization, was able to send one of its trained volunteers and post an alert on Instagram.

“They don't like the attention, [and] when there's more community attention, they do often leave,” Giselle Garcia, programs director with NorCal Resist, tells WIRED. ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Much of this work, however, is being done in private, a move Lopez says is necessary to protect the online infrastructure they have put in place over the course of the past two years. Levin said that Indivisible’s leadership team would be hunkered down in an Airbnb in an undisclosed location on Election Day, on alert to deploy their sizable resources wherever they are needed.

Despite the fear that pervades minority communities about what Trump and his federal agents will do next week, every group leader, activist and volunteer WIRED spoke to in recent weeks has repeated one central belief: They are prepared.

“You have all this traditional election protection infrastructure that's really, really robust, but then there is this grassroots infrastructure,” Jill Garvey, executive director of States at the Core, which combats authoritarianism and political extremism, tells WIRED. “They've done all this tactical documentation training. They know how to be constitutional observers, and I'm pretty confident that when and if we have an uptick in federal enforcement at the polls, it's going to get documented really, really quickly, and it's going to be beamed out to the world that it's happening.”