Dems seek to ban ICE action near polls
Garcia warns president could use the agency in attempt to discourage Latinos from voting
WASHINGTON — Warning that President Donald Trump could weaponize Immigration and Customs Enforcement to scare Latinos away from the polls, several Texas Democrats are pushing to bar immigration action around polling places on voting days.
“We’ve already seen, for instance through the Ukraine scandal, that this president would do anything to be able to win this election, including seeking the help in interfering in an election,” said U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, who on Thursday filed the Polling Access Safety Act, which among other things would bar immigration enforcement actions within a mile of polling places during voting.
“We need stronger laws to make sure that this administration cannot use ICE as a tool to intimidate or discourage any eligible voters from voting,” Garcia said.
The bill would require polling locations to post notices making clear that no immigration enforcement may take place there. It would prohibit ICE and CBP from setting up vehicle checkpoints, conducting searches of public transportation, or performing public training exercises on voting days. Eight other Democrats have signed onto the bill, including U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston, Veronica Escobar of El Paso and Filemon Vela of Harlingen.
Immigrants stand to play a major role in next year’s elections, especially in Texas, where Democrats hope demographic shifts and anger at Trump will help them turn the state blue. Near Houston, for example, a congressional district that stretches along the southwest suburbs from Katy, through Sugar Land and around to Pearland, is among Democrats’ top targets in the nation — in no small part because of its massive immigrant population. The district has grown more than any in Texas, and foreign-born residents make up a quarter of the population.
Trump, meanwhile, has made false claims of widespread voting by non-citizens in the past, including saying earlier this year that “those illegals get out and vote, because they vote anyway. Don’t kid yourself.” After taking office, Trump and other administration officials repeatedly
asserted the unfounded claim that 3 to 5 million non-citizens illegally voted in the 2016 election. Many studies have found voting by non-citizens is actually extremely rare.
The presence of law enforcement at polling places has in the past been a common voter suppression tool, Arturo Vargas, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, told a House committee on Thursday.
“So certainly the placement of immigration enforcement officials at or near polling locations would be designed to suppress the Latino vote,” Vargas testified to members of the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing on the Voting Rights Act. “We’ve seen this happen already in other jurisdictions around the country, where the placement of law enforcement — specifically in Latino-heavy polling locations — were designed to scare Latinos from voting.”
Last November, Customs and Border Protection scuttled plans to stage a “mobile field force demonstration” near a Hispanic neighborhood in El Paso on Election Day after critics raised concerns that the presence of so many armed border agents could discourage voting. CBP and Homeland Security officials rejected allegations that the training exercises had any relation to the election, saying CBP forces had been conducting exercises in El Paso and other border cities in the days before in preparation for the possible arrival of a caravan of Central American migrants.
Still, lawmakers, activists and the American Civil Liberties
Union questioned the decision to conduct the exercise on Election Day.
Former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, now a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said at the time that the planned exercise demonstrated the Trump administration’s “callousness.”
“While I’m glad to see that they’ve postponed it, it really calls into question whether these folks are playing games to try to chill the vote,” he said.
Garcia pointed to the El Paso incident as evidence of what could be done and said she knows of increased ICE activity in Houston
on voting days in the past, as well.
“I really think this could have a chilling effect on turnout,” Garcia said. “There’s already so many barriers in Texas to voting and we’ve seen so many challenges.”
Garcia’s bill, which she filed on Thursday, has drawn the backing of civil rights groups, including Protect Democracy, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Asian Pacific Islander American Vote and Mijente.