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Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not be stationed at polling places for the 2026 elections, an official from the Department of Homeland Security told election officials in a virtual meeting on Wednesday.
“Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation,” said Heather Honey, the deputy assistant secretary of homeland security for election integrity, in response to a question from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, according to five people who listened to the call and confirmed her comments to Votebeat. “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations for this election.”
It’s the most definitive statement yet from President Donald Trump’s administration on a question that has loomed large over the 2026 midterms. As ICE has ramped up immigration enforcement with highly visible operations in cities like Minneapolis, election officials and voting-rights advocates have voiced concern that ICE or other federal agents could attempt to interfere with the voting process on Election Day — particularly after Trump said he regretted not deploying the National Guard in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In November, a White House spokesperson called concerns over armed agents at polling places “baseless conspiracy theories and Democrat talking points” but didn’t explicitly rule it out. Earlier this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations,” but said she couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t happen.
Federal law makes it illegal to station “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” Even so, some Republicans have continued to push the idea.
In a recent interview with CNBC, U.S. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri questioned why ICE should be banned from polling places. On his podcast, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called for ICE to “surround the polls come November.” And Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman introduced a bill that would require federal immigration agents at every voting location in the state, although the proposal ultimately went nowhere.
Honey’s statement, however, may not placate everyone worried about federal interference at the polls. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told Votebeat after the call that he was not inclined to take Honey at her word. “It’s too bad that they used an election denier without any integrity to send that message,” he said, referring to Honey’s previous role as a prominent activist in the movement to question the 2020 election results. “We can’t guarantee that what she said was true,” Fontes said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Honey’s statements on the virtual meeting or Fontes’ remarks. Honey has previously defended her prior work.
Also in the meeting on Wednesday, Honey said that the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database had helped states identify more than 300,000 dead people and 25,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, people on the call said.
The Department of Homeland Security last year overhauled the SAVE database, which was originally designed to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, to turn it into a voter-verification tool. However, the new version of the tool has produced many false positives, and election officials in Texas found that it had flagged some people as noncitizens even though they had already provided proof of their citizenship.
Honey also encouraged states to use hand-marked paper ballots whenever possible, people on the call said, though she said ballot-marking devices should be available for voters who need them. Trump has made unfounded claims that voting machines manipulated the results of the 2020 election and called on states to use exclusively paper ballots. According to Verified Voting, nearly 70% of registered voters already live in a jurisdiction that uses hand-marked paper ballots, and nearly every jurisdiction uses paper ballots in some form.
Otherwise, despite speculation leading up to the meeting, the call on Wednesday was a fairly standard gathering between state election officials and federal agencies whose work is relevant to elections. In addition to Honey, the call included representatives from the FBI, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which organized it.
“Today’s virtual meeting with our federal partners resembled previous ones the Secretaries of State have had with them, during both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said in a statement. He said the federal representatives “reminded us of the resources they make available to help us election officials do our job” and “reaffirmed state officials’ primary role in the election process.”
Carrie Levine and Sasha Hupka contributed reporting.
Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.
