cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/54243760

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](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/preventing-voter-intimidation-federal-agents-polls). When asked in May if he would deploy the National Guard or ICE during the midterms, Trump [said](https://x.com/ElizLanders/status/2054265101322993816): “I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections. We have to have honest elections.”

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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.

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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](https://www.wired.com/story/the-instant-smear-campaign-against-border-patrol-shooting-victim-alex-pretti/) 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](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeroPdBGEut/?img_index=1).

“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.