Democratic district attorneys in major cities around the country are promising to prosecute federal agents suspected of attempting to intimidate people at polls during the midterms.
A coalition of 10 district attorneys — including prosecutors in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Dallas — are vowing in an announcement expected Tuesday to investigate incidents of suspected voter intimidation by federal agents deployed at the behest of President Donald Trump.
“A federal badge is not a license to violate the Constitution, and it is not a shield from state criminal law,” said Larry Krasner, district attorney of Philadelphia. “We will prosecute ICE agents who break the law. There is no category of American who gets to operate above it.”
The coalition also includes Minnesota’s Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who filed charges Monday against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent for shooting a man during an immigration raid.
“Federal law makes voter intimidation a crime. Minnesota law makes voter intimidation a crime,” Moriarty said. “If ICE officers are dispatched to polling places in Hennepin County to frighten voters away from the ballot box, my office will investigate, and we will charge.”
Their announcement, obtained in advance by POLITICO, comes after Trump declined to rule out sending the National Guard or ICE agents to polling places to deter what he has falsely portrayed as voter fraud.
“I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump told reporters last week. “We have to have honest elections.”
Members of the coalition, which calls itself the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, warned the Trump administration that any federal agents sent to polling places within their jurisdictions will be prosecuted.
The Trump administration’s aggressive deployment of federal immigration agents and the National Guard, combined with the president’s history of sewing doubts about elections, has worried Democrats about the possibility that he will seek to sway the midterms by deploying federal forces.
The administration has already taken some steps to oversee election administration. The Department of Justice is suing several states for access to their statewide voter registration rolls. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia’s elections hub for voting records from the 2020 election, which the president falsely claims was stolen.
In February, a Department of Homeland Security official said on a private call with election officials that immigration officers will not be stationed at polling places in November. The call did little at the time to assuage Democrats’ concerns.
It’s unclear whether the prosecutors’ actions would include working with local law enforcement to block federal agents from visiting polling places, or what the potential consequences would be for the election if a prosecutor finds federal agents committed mass voter intimidation.
In addition to Krasner and Moriarty, the coalition includes Travis County, Texas, district attorney José Garza; Dallas County, Texas, district attorney John Creuzot; and Pima County, Arizona. prosecutor Laura Conover. From Virginia, it includes Steve Descano of Fairfax County; Parisa Dehghani-Tafti of Arlington County; Stephanie Morales of Portsmouth; and Ramin Fatehi of Norfolk.
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