MAGA leaders last week announced how they want to steal the midterms.
Within forty-eight hours of Donald Trump’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to airports across the country. Steve Bannon was on his War Room podcast explaining the plan. The airport deployment, he explained, was a “test run” to “really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” Bannon’s guest, MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, agreed enthusiastically: armed immigration agents should be stationed at polling places in November.
I wish we could dismiss this as hot air from two blowhards. But Trump’s airport initiative appears to be aimed at getting Americans used to seeing ICE officers everywhere, so that their presence at voting locations in the fall might feel like just one more step rather than a radical escalation.
Noncitizen voter fraud is the stated justification for Congressional Republicans’ voter suppression legislation, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship documentation to vote, a move that would disenfranchise roughly twenty-one million citizens. The administration’s own data, however, confirms that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. That hasn’t stopped leading Republicans, who see the upcoming midterms as an existential battle, from casting doubt on what’s left of our fragile democratic processes. They understand that posting armed federal agents at polling places can help swing the election by making it much harder for anti-Trump constituencies to vote during the midterms and in 2028.
Trump’s airport initiative appears to be aimed at getting Americans used to seeing ICE officers everywhere.
On college campuses and in immigrant neighborhoods, for example, ICE agents could systematically demand that everybody in line show a passport or birth certificate — basically imposing the SAVE Act through force. Large-scale ICE provocations along these…
Auteur: Eric Blanc
