Ongoing legal developments are casting light on the disturbing lengths the Trump administration is willing to go to subvert the November midterms.
Democracy Forward announced Oct. 7 its receipt of records from Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations describing plans to block eligible voters from accessing ballots.
In addition, a coalition of voting rights organizations expanded a lawsuit filed last month against DHS because new information surfaced about schemes to deploy armed federal agents to polling locations, Democracy Forward said.
Separately, the NAACP filed a federal action against the administration Oct. 2 demanding the government provide records about plans to send an estimated 1,000 personnel into voting precincts during the upcoming election.
The administration’s attempts to cloak voter disruption and intimidation activities in secrecy have been thwarted by federal laws protecting the public’s right to know, Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said.
The Washington, D.C.-based legal group has submitted more than 3,600 Freedom of Information Act requests in the past 20 months in an effort to expose executive overreach. In this case, ICE responded with 166 pages of reports submitted to agency leaders claiming to document fraudulent voting activity.
“The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans.”
“The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Perryman said. “It appears the president and his allies want to pick their voters, as opposed to the way things are supposed to function in a democracy where voters pick their leaders.”
Skye Perryman
The documents revealed that ICE’s investigatory arm, HSI, received more than 48 million records from 2020 election denier Heather Honey, now senior counsel to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and senior adviser to the acting director of ICE, to investigate voting fraud.
The records also disclose that HSI contemplated deploying undercover agents to investigate nonprofit groups the Trump administration accused of registering noncitizens to vote, primarily in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“HSI is seemingly prioritizing investigations into nonprofits that conduct voter registration activities, identifying them through nonprofit search engines and then seeking out so-called ‘derogatory information’ in other databases,” Democracy Forward said.
The records release also disclosed that HIS obtained 26,235 recorders from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in addition to 50.6 million voter roll records from the Department of Justice.
“This trove of ICE documents provides chilling new insights into the breadth and depth of the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to pursue baseless claims of widespread election fraud and assert greater federal control over elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” said Hart Wood, senior oversight counsel at Democracy Forward.
“These records also expose the influence of election denier Heather Honey at both DHS and ICE — including her working in partnership with activists and feeding nearly 50 million records from ‘independent sources’ into DHS voter fraud data collection. They also show, for the first time, that HSI may be using undercover agents to investigate nonprofits for purely political reasons.”
The newly amended League of United Latin American Citizens v. DHS, meanwhile, expands the focus of concern from the possibility of ICE officers intimidating voters at the polls to FBI agents joining the effort, Democracy Forward explained.
“Our amended complaint reflects these developments and makes clear what is at stake: Every eligible voter must be able to cast a ballot, without intimidation or fear of encountering armed federal agents at the polls,” plaintiffs and co-counsel said in a joint statement. “Federal law has protected polling places from this kind of federal intrusion for over 150 years, and the Voting Rights Act prohibits intimidation, threats and coercion of voters and those who help them participate.”
Democracy Forward and Public Rights Project represent LULAC, Common Cause, UnidosUS, the City of Denver, Colo., and newly added Hennepin County, Minn.
“With Election Day just weeks away, and voting already under way in some locations, the need for clarity is urgent. We are asking the court to enforce these longstanding protections and ensure that voters can participate in the 2026 midterm elections freely and without intimidation,” the groups said.
The amended action is just the latest in a growing number of lawsuits filed against federal agencies preparing to invade polling places across the country. A coalition of congressional Democrats and Democratic organizations recently sued to block ICE and FBI agents from harassing voters during the midterms, as did the NAACP and fellow plaintiffs Mi Familia en Accion, OCA-Asian Pacific, National Urban League, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers, United Food and Commercial Workers International and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
The NAACP is the sole plaintiff in the action filed Oct. 2 against the U.S. Justice Department demanding records related to its reported plans to send personnel to polling locations.
“The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has deployed ‘election monitors’ during the 2026 midterm campaign cycle to polling sites in several jurisdictions across the country,” according to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “In some instances, it has done so without notice and without having received consent from jurisdictions. The Justice Department more recently announced plans to deploy over 1,000 election monitors during the upcoming Nov. 3, 2026, general election.”
The civil rights organization has asked the court for emergency relief for its FOIA request because early voting is beginning in many jurisdictions.