On the heels of Donald Trump declaring his interest in a federal takeover of American elections, Steve Bannon not only endorsed the president’s goal, he also floated a specific idea related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said on his podcast earlier this week.
It was easy to take the comments with a grain of salt. The far-right media personality is not currently a White House official, and he has earned a reputation as a blowhard who says outrageous things to get attention. He talked about ICE deployments as if they were a certainty, but there was no reason to assume Bannon had any idea what he was talking about in terms of likely future developments.
That said, it wasn’t long before his idea gained favor among Republicans on Capitol Hill.
For example, Rep. Jason Smith, who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, appeared on CNBC and said, “Why should you ban ICE from being at polling places? Because illegals aren’t supposed to vote in this America.”
The Missouri Republican said he believes that prohibiting ICE agents from patrolling local voting precincts “does not make sense.”
Around the same time, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah asked by way of social media: “If noncitizens don’t vote, then why are Democrats worried about ICE agents going anywhere near a polling location?”
If these GOP lawmakers are genuinely confused, I think I can help.
Only American citizens can register to vote and cast ballots in federal elections. Republicans have spent years trying to find evidence of a national crisis of noncitizens voting, but the party has so far come up empty, chasing a mirage.
With this in mind, there’s no reason for ICE agents to be at polling stations, looking for people who don’t exist.
Relatedly, it’s not clear what exactly ICE agents would do at local voting precincts — except perhaps harass people who they think don’t look like U.S. citizens, based entirely on racist profiling standards.
There’s no great mystery here. Too many on the right apparently want to create an environment of fear and intimidation, deploying federal immigration agents in the hopes that it might discourage voters from minority communities, fearing harassment and possible detention, from showing up and participating in their own country’s democracy.
To think that some might have a problem with this “does not make sense” is ridiculous.
If lawmakers such as Smith and Lee continue to find this confusing, they could take up the matter with Todd Lyons, the acting ICE chief, who testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday that he didn’t see the point of what some Republicans were proposing.
“There’s no reason for us to deploy to a polling facility,” he told Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan at the hearing.
