Threat of stationing immigration agents around voting locations has become a concern as it can be a deterrent to legal residents of color who are concerned they may be harassed by federal agents
The White House refused to rule out following through on the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents being sent out to “surround the polls” when voters cast ballots in this November’s midterm elections as a way of depressing Democratic turnout and boosting chances of Republican victories in the House of Representatives and Senate.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said she could offer “no guarantee” that ICE personnel would not be stationed at polling sites when Americans are in the process of choosing whether to extend the Republican stranglehold on power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
She had been asked about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent call for Trump to deploy ICE around election sites on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, just days after Trump himself called for a Republican “takeover” of vote-counting in Democratic-led states and municipalities.
Well I guess we’re going to be exercising our second amendment rights because that’s tyranny.
Why is she so obsessed with getting ICE agents killed?
So they can escalate.
Escalate how? They don’t hold the flyover sovereign and they are actively losing control of territory. Their navy is spent and overspending, the national guard has its fucking jugular hanging open in every small town, and they’re about to commit the army to Iran. If all they have is ICE and CPB they are going to have a very bad time.
Can’t guarantee I won’t communicate with my community to show up to the polling stations with a large group of armed citizens to ensure we can vote safely without the interference of terrorists.
Doesn’t stop them from ratfucking the votes after they’re submitted, but hey, gotta do what we can.
I hear ya, but consider that will make a VERY tense situation that will likely deter voters from engaging.
Gear up, the hopefools will learn too late.
Fucking brown shirts
How the fuck did we get to a point where it’s normal for the government to say these things?
Capitalism
Conservatives stopped respecting our Constitution and our nation as a whole.
But they’re pretty good at showing up to vote, unlike many other Americans. That, combined with our electoral system being a joke and designed to allow a minority to have control, and you’ve got our current situation.
Every voter come armed.
Thats not a warning intended to keep the public safe, it’s a threat intended to get the public to give up on democracy
That’s atrocious.
Republicans have stolen every presidential election they’ve won since 2000. There haven’t been consequences yet, and the future won’t be any different unless we stand up.
They tried damn hard to steal the ones they lost as well, and know that because of the last year they may not get voted for, for another couple decades. They know they can’t win, so they are abandoning democracy.
Despite the rampant doomerism in Lemmy and other spaces, it’s still very hard to subvert the entire US electoral process, even if they put a lot of money and effort behind it, it’s not like other countries that have been overthrown or had their voting rigged, the administration would need to do whatever they’re going to do 50 times, across a vast landscape of different procedures and policies around voting and security.
For example, if it was that easy to rig US elections we wouldn’t have seen giant bogeymen like Mamdani and Katie Wilson and other socialists/progressives take so many local leadership seats recently.
Yes, they are going to try to use ICE like their own private mercenary army to intimate voters in blue states, in areas with large populations of immigrants and people of color, that should be expected. And that’s fine, that’s where we meet them.
Yes, but also I’m not convinced they haven’t done so by voter suppression. I’ve seen a lot fewer articles on that and that may not be part of voter fraud invests. There continue to be way too many attempts to suppress votes. How do you even count how many votes didn’t happen?
And it only needs to happen in swing states. You combine that with gerrymandering and it doesn’t have to prevent many voters to make a difference
Exactly. Look back at the Jim Crow era. That’s the goal. Jim Crow didn’t work by white people stealing the vote. It worked by writing laws that openly made it so black people couldn’t vote. Ultimately it’s a lot more sustainable to simply write laws that serve your side than it is to try to hold onto power by repeated election fraud. With the latter, you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections. But if the elections are crooked but entirely within the law? Much more difficult for the military to refuse to acknowledge those.
you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections
You put too much faith in the military not being full of fascist sycophants and those going along to get along.
I strongly feel this time around it’s going to be a bigger spectacle, a bigger event all around because the tone has shifted. Watch nightly network news for an example. If you can choke through the liberal slop, they are featuring stories now about ICE acting like terrorists, about the administration lying, about people driving masked agents out of their town, they are painting it like an “underdogs versus the feds” narrative. (Not because the networks are suddenly finding human consciousness, but because this storyline sells.)
Midterms may go either way, but we’ve had too much success either way to discount the power of individual states in changing their representation, and with that, their votes and funding. That’s a huge deal. We just need to break the stranglehold a little and the system could stalemate for the next couple years and that’s enough time for people who aren’t Vance or Harris to start capturing media attention.
I got PTO, i don’t mind protecting people and staying at the voting place all day to protect them from the ICE thugs taking them to a concentration camp.
Problem is people won’t show if they fear ICE will attest yhem, even if they are citizens as ICE has already proven.
Its intimidation
The very act of floating this idea is election fraud. Even if they don’t do it, threatening to do it could discourage voters.
We can offer no guarantee that democrat voters won’t be harmed, detained or even murdered while voting.
Republican voters are probably gonna get harassed, arrested, or killed too if they happen to not be white. Then there will be outcry from Republicans who were perfectly fine with it happening to democrats
Democratic leadership is sleepwalking us into a permanent state of authoritarian rule.
That’s not fair. They are still working super hard to disarm the people in blue states.
I think it’s open jealousy about how you can get away with practically anything from undermining constitutional amendments to profit personally - all without seemingly being held accountable.
Like not being held accountable for supporting a genocide because of First Past The Post voting forces people to vote for democrats?
Obviously.
This is obviously where it was going.
From day one, from the first lie, to the arming of his own private army, this has been the goal. Obviously.
Americans will be surprised, of course. As always.
“Back when it was step 3, all the alarmists were warning me about how bad step 10 will be. Now that we’re at step 7, the logical thing to do is continue to accuse people of being alarmist.”
- 9 out of 10 Americans (real Americans)
Americans will be surprised, of course. As always.
No one’s accused Americans of being smart.
You know Jan 6 rioters with guns and pipe bombs who attacked officers got pardon.
And employment.
