Steve Bannon says ICE will ‘surround the polls’ as Trump doubles down on taking over elections
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 23: Chief Strategist to the President Steve Bannon speaks during the Semafor World Economy Summit 2025 at Conrad Washington on April 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Steve Bannon said Tuesday that the federal government is planning to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to patrol polling stations during this year’s midterm elections.
“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon, a former senior advisor to President Donald Trump and still a figure of influence in the administration, said on Tuesday’s episode of his War Room podcast, addressing Democrats. “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
Bannon’s comments came just a day after Trump said he believes that Republicans should “nationalize voting,” escalating concerns that the president is plotting to interfere in this year’s midterm elections.
In a radio interview on The Dan Bongino Show Monday, Trump struck a similar note to Bannon, framing voting itself as corrupt and claimed elections were stolen from him.
“These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally. Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it,” Trump falsely claimed. “The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Trump doubled down on his comments to nationalize voting Tuesday during an Oval Office press conference.
“If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” Trump said. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”
State election leaders are preparing for an escalating possibility that the Trump administration will interfere in some way in the midterm elections. At the annual winter conference for the National Association of Secretaries of State, Democracy Docket spoke with a number of Democratic state election chiefs who said they have participated in calls and tabletop exercises gaming out the ways in which the Trump administration might try to rig the vote — and how they would respond.
“We’re imagining ways in which the federal government might explicitly or implicitly interfere with the administration of elections, and we’re planning out what our response would be,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon (D) recently told Democracy Docket. “Part of that’s a litigation response, part of that is a communications response, part of that is a purely administrative response. But we’re planning out what we would do if certain things happen.”
