Dem Senator Pushes Ice Director To Admit His Officers Have No Place at Polling Stations

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Feb 12, 2026

Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrives for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on oversight of ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in Dirksen building on Thursday, February 12, 2026. The hearing focused on the shootings by ICE in Minneapolis. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) TPM illustration/Getty Images.

Democrats have been warning for some time that there is a potential near future in which President Trump takes his army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and floods polling places in areas that tend to not vote for Republicans during the midterm elections, an election-meddling rerun of what he has already done in blue cities and states around the country.

Throwing thousands of ICE agents at perceived problems and political enemies has become a staple of Trump’s second term, a tactic made especially obvious by his Department of Homeland Security’s weeks-long enforcement mission in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After the Supreme Court blocked his assertion that he could deploy the National Guard to cities he doesn’t like in wanton fashion, ICE agents took on an even more significant role as his agents of the state. These deployments have had the effect — seemingly intentional — of escalating tensions with American citizens while purporting to be merely a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. (The immigration crackdown is itself very real, though most of those targeted and arrested by ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents this year have not been criminals with violent records, as the administration has claimed.)

In the wake of Trump’s calls last week to “nationalize voting,” concerns about Trump using his now-favored secret police to intimidate voters in “15 places” he deems rife with voter fraud have increased. Trump’s former White House chief strategist from his first term, Steve Bannon, spelled out his wishes for Trump’s election meddling during an episode of his War Room podcast just after Trump first began talking about potential efforts to get Republicans to help him “nationalize” the vote. The Trump administration has not directly answered questions about the possibility, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying last week that she “can’t guarantee” ICE agents wouldn’t be near voting places.

During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing with DHS officials on Thursday, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) questioned acting ICE Director Todd Lyons about how he would respond to orders to deploy his agents to the polls this fall. Lyons admitted that federal immigration officers would have “no reason” to be at polling places, which is perhaps the most direct engagement we’ve gotten from anyone in the Trump administration yet on this issue. Here’s their exchange:

Slotkin: When you extrapolate out and you listen to what the president and his Cabinet are saying, I have to ask about our 2026 elections. The president says we should federalize our elections, even though the U.S. Constitution was written by our founders to give that power to the states so that we would never have a president who took too much power and tried to become a king. He’s tired to get voter rolls, including in my state, he’s complained that elections aren’t free and fair. In 2020 he came up with a playbook to deploy federal law enforcement around polling places and the White House spokeswoman will not rule that out as of a month and a half ago. So I have to ask, Mr. Lyons, do you believe that ICE has the authority to be deployed to U.S. polling places around the country?
Lyons: So ma’am, we’re civil, we obviously do civil enforcement and criminal law enforcement. Theres no reason for us to deploy to a polling facility.

Lyons went on to clarify that Homeland Security investigations do sometimes involve looking into cases of voter fraud.

“That’s fine,” Slotkin said. “I’m talking about something that I think would be extraordinary in American history, which is uniformed and masked ICE agents encircling polling places. And its not fantasy, it’s not made up, these are things that the president and his Cabinet have suggested.”

“There’s no reason to use ICE officers in that,” Lyons said.

“I hope … that you don’t buckle,” Slotkin responded. “Because I think our democracy is literally dependent on it.”

— Nicole LaFond

Gabbard Whistleblower Complaint Is About Kushner

According to new reporting from the Wall Street Journal:

The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
It couldn’t be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner. But the connection to Kushner sheds further light on the top-secret whistleblower complaint that bureaucratically stalled within Gabbard’s agency for eight months and was kept locked in a safe until it reached Congress in heavily redacted form last week.

DHS Shutdown on the Horizon With No Deal on ICE Reforms

Congress will leave town today without funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), triggering a partial, DHS-specific shutdown that would go into effect at the end of Friday.

That comes as the Trump White House — alongside congressional Republicans — and Democrats failed to make any meaningful progress in the ICE reform negotiations.

The Senate took up a long-shot procedural vote on Thursday, before lawmakers left town for recess, in the hopes of passing another short-term stopgap for the DHS funding bill. But Democrats, who have been unimpressed with the Republicans unserious response to their ICE reform demands, had already made it clear they would not help Republicans unless they saw some meaningful action from Republicans.

The DHS shutdown will include a funding lapse not just for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) but for departments like TSA, FEMA and the Coast Guard. In reality ICE and CBP will be largely unaffected since they already have tens of billions of dollars in funding that they received from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

In order to avoid a full blown DHS shutdown, House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced a bill on Wednesday to fully fund every agency under DHS except ICE and CBP. But Republicans are unlikely to get onboard with that as it would increase the chances of a prolonged ICE/CBP shutdown. It would also make it difficult for Republicans to engage in their usual attacks, blaming Democrats for shutting down departments like FEMA and TSA.

— Emine Yücel