A coalition of civil rights groups and the city of Denver sued the Trump administration on September 10, asking a federal judge to block armed ICE officers from going anywhere near polling places this November. The entire case turns on nine sentences Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said out loud on September 1. Read those nine sentences in full, in the words the lawsuit itself quotes, and they describe something narrower than the legal claims built on top of them.
What Mullin Actually Said on September 1
The League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause and its Education Fund, UnidosUS, and the City and County of Denver filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against DHS, Secretary Mullin, ICE, and Acting ICE Director David Venturella. The case is League of United Latin American Citizens v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:26-cv-03157. It asks the court to declare unlawful what the complaint calls the "Polling Place Policy" and to bar armed federal officers from going near voting sites, drop boxes, and curbside voting for any reason other than repelling an armed enemy of the United States.
The complaint's own paragraph 41 quotes Mullin telling reporters on September 1:
"The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down. . . . ICE's job is immigration, customs enforcement. That's their job . . . if we're serving a warrant we will be where we need to be."
That quote comes from Politico's September 1 report, cited in the complaint's own footnote. Two conditions, both tied to a specific threat or a specific person already being pursued. Not a standing patrol.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin with ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers at a ceremony in Dallas, Texas, June 1, 2026. This photo predates and is unrelated to his September 1 polling-place comments. (DHS photo by Tia Dufour, public domain)
How the Lawsuit Redescribes the Same Quote
By the time that quote reaches the complaint's actual legal claims, the word doing the work has changed. Count I and Count II both accuse DHS of authorizing armed ICE officers to go to polling places "for the purpose of conducting routine civil immigration enforcement." Paragraph 143 repeats it: the administration intends "to conduct routine civil immigration enforcement, such as serving warrants or detaining individuals, at polling places."
Mullin never said routine. He said a threat to the polling place, or a warrant on someone ICE has "been actively tracking down." That is targeted language, and the gap matters because the Administrative Procedure Act claims in Counts I and II need the policy to look like a settled, general practice, not a narrow contingency. The public statements from the plaintiffs go further still. UnidosUS president Janet Murguía called it "voter suppression, plain and simple." Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón called armed officers at polling places "a tactic used by dictators." Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said it is "only meant to scare people and suppress votes." None of that language comes from Mullin's actual sentence, which never mentions patrolling, suppression, or intimidation as a goal.
None of that means the underlying legal question is weak. It means the case rests on a characterization of Mullin's words that the words themselves do not fully support.
The 1865 Law at the Center of the Case
The statute the lawsuit invokes, 18 U.S.C. § 592, bars any officer of the United States from ordering, bringing, or keeping "any troops or armed men" at a place where a general or special election is held, unless that force is "necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States." Violators face up to five years in prison and permanent disqualification from federal office. It traces to the Act of February 25, 1865, passed in the closing months of the Civil War specifically to keep the federal executive from using armed force to influence elections.
The complaint includes a detail worth sitting with. As originally written in 1865, the law had two exceptions: repelling armed enemies, or keeping "the peace at the polls." In 1909, Congress deliberately repealed the second exception, leaving only the first. That is significant here because Mullin's first stated justification, responding to "a threat to that polling place," sounds exactly like the peacekeeping rationale Congress voted to remove more than a century ago. His second justification, serving a warrant on someone ICE is tracking, raises a separate question the statute's text does not obviously answer either way.
Official record
League of United Latin American Citizens v. DHS, No. 1:26-cv-03157 (D.D.C.), Complaint filed September 10, 2026.
"The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down. . . . if we're serving a warrant we will be where we need to be." — Secretary Markwayne Mullin, quoted at Complaint ¶ 41
Read or download the full 38-page complaint (PDF) · page 11 shown above
The Paper Trail That Made This Lawsuit Possible
Mullin's comments did not appear out of nowhere, and the complaint spends several pages explaining why the plaintiffs did not wait for an actual deployment before suing. On February 3, Steve Bannon said on his show that "we're going to have ICE surround the polls come November," tying it to President Trump's call to "nationalize the voting." Two days later, then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters she "can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November." In March, Todd Blanche, then deputy attorney general and now attorney general, asked a CPAC audience, "why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?"
By June, the Justice Department had removed a decades-old manual from its website that told federal agents plainly that the polling-place law "makes it a felony for any federal official to send 'armed men' to the vicinity of open polling places," a change flagged in a letter from Sen. Alex Padilla and colleagues. The same manual had guided the department's Election Day legal desk for roughly 40 years. Around the same time, nine secretaries of state, led by Colorado's Jena Griswold, wrote Mullin asking him to rule out ICE at the polls. Then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons replied on May 11 that "there is no reason for ICE personnel to be deployed to polling places," while adding that ICE "plays an important role in investigating voter fraud and will continue to perform this vital mission."
Three Polling Places ICE Had Already Visited
The complaint does not rest only on statements. It alleges three specific incidents before Mullin's September 1 remarks. On May 20, armed ICE agents detained someone in the parking lot of an active polling place in San Antonio, Texas, before the county sheriff had them leave, according to the San Antonio Current. On June 2, what local election workers described as "a couple vehicles worth" of armed ICE agents showed up at a polling place in Ventura County, California, during a crush of voters, per the Ventura County Star. On June 23, ICE agents entered a polling place in Syracuse, New York, to question a poll worker about a social-media comment she had made five months earlier, waiting until she was mid-shift to do it, NPR reported.
A polling-place sign outside a Minnesota voting site during the 2020 general election. This is a stock file photo used for illustration and is not one of the sites named in the complaint. (Photo by Tony Webster, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Denver joined the suit because its population includes large Mexican, Vietnamese, and Ethiopian immigrant communities that the complaint calls "a likely target for ICE activity." The Clerk and Recorder's office says it has begun training election judges on de-escalating encounters with federal agents, and that recruiting poll workers has gotten harder as rumors of armed agents at the polls spread.
What Happens Next
Early voting begins as soon as September 18 in some states, with Election Day on November 3. The complaint asks for a declaration that the Polling Place Policy is unlawful and an injunction against it, plus attorneys' fees. No hearing date had been reported as of publication. This is a separate fight from the DHS voter-verification database fight already before the Supreme Court, where the justices set a September 15 deadline for the plaintiffs' response after the D.C. Circuit upheld a block on it.
Whatever a judge eventually rules on the Administrative Procedure Act claims, the honest reading of what Mullin actually said on September 1 is narrower than "armed agents patrolling the polls." It is also narrower than a policy anyone can call routine with a straight face and a citation. Voters trying to decide how worried to be about November should read Mullin's own sentence before they read what four advocacy groups and a mayor called it.
