The picture Steve Bannon tried to paint for November was vivid and ugly: federal immigration agents, in dark jackets and body armor, ring-fencing American polling places at the behest of Donald Trump.
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Donald Trump’s former White House strategist bragged last week, turning a routine midterm election into a threat display rather than a civic exercise.
Then the actual head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was hauled before the Senate — and quietly yanked the curtain down on the whole performance, leaving Donald Trump’s allies looking more like they were bluffing than outlining a real plan.
Testifying to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, ICE director Todd Lyons was asked the simple, central question: is there any legitimate reason for his agents to be at polling stations during the midterms, as Donald Trump’s allies have loudly suggested?
“Obviously we do civil enforcement and criminal law enforcement,” Lyons said. “There’s no reason for us to deploy to a polling station.”
In one line, he demolished Bannon’s fantasy of ICE agents pacing outside voting sites and undercut any suggestion that Donald Trump had some lawful “election security” strategy sitting in his back pocket. It was, as voting-rights attorney Marc Elias later put it, Lyons “gave up the game.”
FULL STEVE BANNON RANT: No more endless wars, no more selling out young Americans. Put America first and American citizens first especially the generation corporate elites are abusing and sidelining and let the rest of the world handle its own problems. pic.twitter.com/0lQu70qaJa
— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) August 15, 2025
Elias, a veteran Democratic elections lawyer who has spent years fighting voter suppression cases tied to Donald Trump’s false fraud narrative, unpacked the moment in an interview with progressive podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen. That “no reason” line, he argued, was the quiet part said out loud.
“He gave up the game in that he said the truth, there is no reason, no legitimate reason, why ICE would be at the polls or surrounding the polls or in proximity of the polls,” Elias said. “Kudos to him for saying that, but don’t sleep on the second half.”
Because Lyons didn’t stop there. When pressed on what would actually happen if Donald Trump — a president with a long track record of trying to bend law enforcement to his political will — picked up the phone and told ICE to send agents to the polls, the ICE chief reportedly fumbled.
Elias described him as having “stammered and stammered and stammered” when forced to contemplate that hypothetical. The law was clear; Donald Trump’s politics were not.
BANNON: Todd Blanche is not a guy that runs around with his hair on fire. He was very mad last night. This cannot be allowed to stand, particularly when you have troops in the field. Lincoln and FDR would never have allowed it to stand. They would take immediate action on this. pic.twitter.com/1AJPk15nIV
— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) November 20, 2025
Bannon’s chest-thumping about ICE “surrounding” the polls did not come from nowhere. The MAGA movement built around Donald Trump has fed for years on the lie of widespread voter fraud, particularly in cities and communities of color. The idea of immigration agents posted near ballot boxes isn’t just a policy debate — it’s an intimidation tactic dressed up as “election security.”
Even the White House press office, now run by Donald Trump’s loyalists, danced around it. Asked whether the administration was planning to deploy ICE to polling locations, press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to shut the door.
“I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November,” she said, before adding that she hadn’t heard the president, Donald Trump, discuss “any formal plans” to station agents outside.
That kind of hedging is exactly what alarmed Elias and other voting-rights advocates. If you’re serious about free elections, you don’t leave voters — especially Latino communities, mixed-status families, and naturalized citizens — guessing about whether the people who can arrest them might be waiting outside the gym where they’re supposed to vote because Donald Trump wants a show of force.
Elias has already drawn a hard legal line. He’s vowed to sue the administration if ICE agents appear at polling places during the midterm voting period, calling the threat part of an “existential” challenge to American democracy fueled by Donald Trump’s election lies.
🚨 ICE DIRECTOR TODD LYONS: “In my 30 years of law enforcement, I NEVER thought we would have to send law enforcement to protect law enforcement!”
This is why Tim Walz and Jacob Frey need to face criminal charges.
Enough is ENOUGH.pic.twitter.com/ETYxqm9s1A
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 18, 2026
“Steve Bannon didn’t just say that there would be ICE in cities; what Steve Bannon said is that it would be ICE surrounding the polls,” Elias warned. He explicitly linked that image to scenes many Americans still haven’t forgotten: federal-style forces hemming in civilians in the streets.
“The images we saw in Minneapolis where they surrounded cars, where they surrounded peaceful protesters, where they surrounded US citizens, and we know in the tragic instances, what that meant for those individuals.”
For all the theater, there is a blunt, boring reality here: putting ICE at polling places is not just bad optics, it’s unlawful, no matter how aggressively Donald Trump world tries to brand it as toughness.
“Is it legal? No. It would be totally illegal,” Elias said. Federal law and long-standing consent decrees severely restrict the presence of law enforcement in and around voting sites precisely because of the chilling effect it has on turnout. The point of the polling place is to make citizens feel safe showing up, not watched — a principle that has never sat comfortably with Donald Trump’s appetite for intimidation politics.
And yet Elias is unsparing about ICE’s track record.
Our friend Todd Lyons, Acting Director of @ICEgov : “The First Amendment gives you the right to peacefully protest, speak freely, observe and record — as well as many other freedoms protected in our Constitution.
The First Amendment does not give you the right to impede,… pic.twitter.com/THD4PFXB9X
— Blue Lives Matter (@bluelivesmtr) February 16, 2026
“Honestly, look at the images we have seen ICE do,” he said. “They’re breaking all kinds of laws; they’re breaking laws every single day.”
That, in his view, is what makes Lyons’s moment of honesty significant but not fully reassuring. The agency head can acknowledge there is “no reason” for ICE to be anywhere near a ballot box. The law can say the same. But lawlessness in this arena has never started with a memo. It has started with Donald Trump or his surrogates demanding a show of force, and subordinates deciding how far they are willing to go.
“There may be no reason, there may be no good reason, there may be no lawful reason, but that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t insist to Kristi Noem that it won’t happen anyway,” Elias warned, invoking the South Dakota governor and close Trump ally.
In the end, he argues, what will stop an illegal ICE deployment at the polls is not “some law in a book on a dusty shelf,” but public pressure and preemptive outrage aimed squarely at Donald Trump’s latest attempt to warp the machinery of the state.
“It’s going to stop because you and I are gonna call it out, everyone watching this is going to take this seriously,” he told Cohen.
That’s the strange tension of this moment. On paper, the system worked: a career official told Congress there is no justification for using immigration agents as campaign props for Donald Trump. In practice, the fact that anyone even had to ask should be a warning of its own.
