A senior DHS official said ICE will do their regular duties on the day of midterm elections, though Sec. Markwayne Mullin said agents would enter a polling place to serve a warrant.
Page A2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 September 2026
DHS says no ICE at the polls, still counting foreigners' rap sheets 'as fast as we can.'
As it ran on the front
Look, the Department of Homeland Security has been crystal clear on this, and frankly the confusion here is coming from people who haven't read the statement carefully, which — fine, I'll grant you it's one sentence, but it's a clear sentence. DHS says there are no plans, none, for ICE to be at polling places during the midterm elections. That should be the end of it. It's not, apparently, because people keep bringing up the biometric scanner rollout at the border, as if the two things are related, which they're — okay, they might be a little related, administratively, same department, but operationally, totally separate, I want to be very clear about that, separate.
Now, on the scanners: a senator has said the rollout is happening 'as fast as we can,' and I think that phrase gets unfairly mocked. 'As fast as we can' is not an admission of failure, it is a commitment to velocity. Is it also, technically, an admission that the current pace has not been fast enough to prevent — did I say prevent? I mean, to fully process — a large number of foreign nationals' criminal histories from being logged correctly the first time? I — yes. Okay. It is that too. Both things can be true. The department is moving as fast as it can, and the department was also, for some period of time whose length nobody has specified, moving too slowly to count. I don't see the contradiction, and if I do see it, I'm choosing not to point a flashlight at it, which is different from hiding it, legally.…
…(cont) The polling place assurance stands on its own, separate system, different database, no relationship whatsoever to the underreporting issue, which — again, I want to stress — was a records problem, not a competence problem. Those are different words. I looked them up. They're different words that, in this specific instance, describe the exact same event.
DHS has this handled. Both halves of it. Independently. At the same time. As fast as they can.
“They keep telling you ICE won't be at your polling place like that's the whole ballgame, meanwhile the same department admits it's been sitting on an undercounted pile of foreign nationals' rap sheets for who knows how long. Reassurance on the front page, backlog in the filing cabinet. Pick which one you'd trust with a biometric scanner.”
“DHS has been unambiguous: no ICE presence at polling locations, full stop, and I think people conflating that with the biometric rollout are engaging in some fairly lazy pattern matching — different system, different mandate, different — look, they're run by the same agency, fine, but competence in one lane doesn't require competence in the other, and if it did, well, that's a separate conversation.”
The receipts
Markwayne Mullin was responding to a House intelligence committee report that raised alarms over the failure to adopt recommendations from the 9/11 Commission's 2004 report.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.