White House’s chilling warning about midterm elections: ‘Can’t guarantee an ICE agent won’t be around polling locations’
The White House refused to rule out following through on a call for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents to “surround the polls” when voters cast ballots in this November’s midterm elections as a way of depressing Democratic turnout and boosting chances of a Republican victory this fall.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said she could offer “no guarantee” that ICE personnel would not be stationed at polling sites when Americans are in the process of choosing whether to extend the Republican stranglehold on power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
She had been asked about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent call for Trump to deploy ICE around election sites on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, just days after Trump himself called for a Republican “takeover” of vote-counting in Democratic-led states and municipalities.
Bannon had endorsed Trump’s suggestion that his party seize control of voting machinery and counting, telling listeners: “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.”
When pressed on whether Trump was considering heeding Bannon’s advice, Leavitt demurred, telling reporters that the idea of putting ICE at polling sites wasn’t something she’d “ever heard the president consider.”
But when asked to pledge that Trump would keep immigration agents away from voting, she said “can’t guarantee that an ice agent won’t be around a polling location in November” and called the matter “a very silly hypothetical question” and “disingenuous” while stating that she hadn’t heard Trump “discuss any formal plans.”
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