The Franklin County board of elections building at 1700 Morse Street in central Columbus, Ohio, is an early voting site for next week’s midterms. It is also located in the middle of the large Somali American community that was targeted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s Operation Buckeye last December. The campaign was designed, the agency said, to find “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”
The result was a paltry number of arrests, months of sustained harassment, and a lingering feeling that ICE agents could return at any minute, especially around election time.
“Here in central Ohio, our early voting location is located in a neighborhood that’s been the hardest hit by ICE, and it’s an immigrant community neighborhood,” Liliana Rivera Baiman, an organizer with the 614 ICE Watch group and the Ohio Good Neighbor Network, tells WIRED. “So we knew that that neighborhood was at risk and that people were going to be going to vote there, and a lot of the community there, like our Somali community that can vote, our Latino community, they walk to the location.”
Baiman’s group is responding to the threats from the Trump administration to target immigrant communities during the midterms. Dozens of volunteers are already patrolling near early voting sites in Columbus every day, Baiman says, and the figure will rise to around 250 on Election Day. They have been trained to document, record, and report any sightings of federal immigration agents, sharing the information in dozens of Signal and WhatsApp groups.
“We teach people that they have to observe the behavior. We show them what to look out for, what does ICE look like, this is the type of uniform that agents wear, these are the types of vehicles that they drive,” Baiman says. “We show them examples so that they can get familiar with what they might see.”
These efforts are being repeated in towns and cities across the country. WIRED spoke to a dozen people taking part in this effort, whose groups are working together to combat what they see as an existential threat to American democracy. Central to this response are training sessions run by massive national groups like Common Cause, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Indivisible, as well as local groups like Living United for Change in Arizona and NorCal Resist, that have created massive groups of people who can document and record what ICE is doing, understand voters rights, and in many cases, prepare for worst-case scenarios.
Officially, the Department of Homeland Security has said that it has no plans to deploy ICE agents to polling locations on Election Day. “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” a DHS spokesperson tells WIRED, but added: “ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.”