Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) has a message for his party ahead of the midterms: Get monitors to the polls, lawyers on speed dial, and whatever you do, keep ICE out. That last part is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
California Democrat Ro Khanna says "we need to make sure ICE isn't at the polls."
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 23, 2026
American elections are for American citizens. Why is Khanna trying to protect over 270,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote? pic.twitter.com/KeR4b9m5qF
"We need to have monitors at the polls who are volunteers. We need to make sure ICE isn't at the polls. We need to make sure that we have election observers and prepared to take legal action. The president is going to do everything he can to delegitimize this election."
The ICE-at-the-polls claim started in February with Steve Bannon, who said agents would “surround the polls.” The White House responded that Trump had discussed no such plan.
DHS was even more direct later that month. A department election-integrity official told state officials that any suggestion ICE would be present at polling locations was “simply not true.” An agent could respond to an active public-safety threat, DHS said, but the department was not planning immigration operations at polling places.
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Khanna did not identify a deployment order or offer any other evidence that ICE was headed to the polls. He presented it as something Democrats needed to stop anyway.
On June 9, DHS directed ICE to begin removal proceedings against noncitizens who illegally vote in American elections and to refer appropriate cases for criminal prosecution. The directive targets illegal voting; it does not send agents to polling places.
The White House released its own summary of what DHS found:
"According to a D.H.S. review of state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher—yet even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote."
A draft DHS release broke it down by state: 190,832 noncitizens registered in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania, totaling 256,463 across just four states that refused to cooperate.
Predictably, Democrat election officials cried foul. Nevada's Secretary of State called its number "wildly speculative," California claimed it lacked confidence in the methodology, and Pennsylvania promised to take a look, someday. Not one of them has bothered to release a competing count. Funny how that works.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a crime. The fight is over whether the government will catch it before an illegal ballot is cast.
That fight hit the House floor Wednesday. Republicans attached the SAVE America Act to the defense authorization bill and got it done: voter ID, proof of citizenship, crackdown on mail ballots. Now it goes to the Senate, where Democrats will do everything in their power to kill it. If they succeed, nothing changes, and that's exactly what they're counting on.
Poll monitors and election lawyers are routine. Khanna's demand to keep ICE away from the polls is not. DHS already denied any plan to send immigration agents there, and he offered no evidence that had changed. If noncitizens are not voting, what exactly does he think ICE would find?
Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote.
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