The city of Denver and a coalition of civil rights groups sued the Trump administration to block the deployment of federal immigration officers at polling places during the midterm elections.
Filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the complaint alleges that a policy articulated by the Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, Markwayne Mullin, in early September violates federal law barring the deployment of armed officials at polling sites.
Latino civil rights groups UnidosUS and the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, as well as the voting rights organization Common Cause, are also named as plaintiffs.
“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” the lawsuit states. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal immigration enforcement officers if they choose to cast a ballot.”
This case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, a Biden appointee.
President Donald Trump has pushed to restrict voting ahead of the midterm elections and undermine confidence in election security, in part by stoking fear of noncitizen voting, an illegal and rare occurrence. The Justice Department deployed dozens of election monitors to polling locations across the country during primary elections, and officials have vowed to send up to 1,000 more to monitor polling sites during the November elections.
The lawsuit specifically cites remarks from Mullin and DHS from Sept. 1 that ICE officers may be deployed to polling places during the midterm elections for “specific threats.” Plaintiffs say those statements amount to a policy that did not undergo “a reasoned decisionmaking process” before it was enacted and announced.
Mullin told reporters at the time that ICE officers could be deployed “if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down.” DHS later clarified that the agency is not “planning operations targeting polling locations” but its officers may respond if an “active public safety threat endangered a polling location.”
The presence of ICE agents at the polls, the complaint states, would disrupt voting and interfere with local election officials’ ability to administer elections smoothly and safely. Plaintiffs also argue that Americans have a well-founded fear of federal immigration officers, pointing to ProPublica’s findings that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE officers, and in many cases assaulted, tased and shot.
“ICE has repeatedly conducted enforcement operations in which they stop, seize, and interrogate people based on how they look, what language they speak, and where they work, rather than on individualized suspicion that a particular person lacks lawful status — making clear that U.S. citizenship is no bar to being detained and interrogated,” the complaint states.
DHS has repeatedly denied that its law enforcement officials engage in racial profiling during immigration operations. A report from December 2025 found that Latinos are disproportionately targeted by ICE in immigration operations.
This appears to be the first such lawsuit filed against DHS, just days before early voting starts in some states. The department did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
“Putting armed officers in polling places is a tactic used by dictators, but we won’t be scared out of exercising our rights,” Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón said in a statement. “No American should ever have to walk past armed federal law enforcement just to cast a ballot, yet this administration has adopted a policy that allows exactly that.”
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