Politics

‘A pretext to rig the election’: Democrats scramble to block ICE crackdowns near polling sites

Published

5 months ago

January 30, 2026

Immigration enforcement is sowing chaos in Minneapolis and across the country. Democrats, elections officials and civil rights groups fear it could interfere with this November’s elections — and are scrambling for a response.

They’re warning that the White House’s deployments of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents could act as a voter suppression tool should armed officers conduct raids at or near polling locations, scaring citizens into staying home.

“You have to see what’s happening: Trump is trying to create a pretext to rig the election,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It stands to reason that this private police [force] that he’s building is, in part, to be used to try to suppress turnout in the election.”

Senate Democrats considered a requirement banning ICE agents from polling sites as part of their demands in negotiating the Homeland Security funding bill, according to Murphy and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). But that policy was not included in Senate Democratic appropriators’ final list of demands to avoid a partial government shutdown, leaving voting rights advocates and Democratic state election officials on edge about what’s to come.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called fears of voter suppression “Democrat conspiracies” with “no basis in reality.”

“President Trump cares deeply about the integrity of our elections — and so do the millions of Americans who sent him back to office based on his pledge to secure our elections,” Jackson said in a statement. “These Democrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn’t be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media. ICE is focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from [the] country, who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote.”

ICE’s aggressive crackdowns have already led to citizens hiding at home, and election officials worry that fears of harassment and arrest could keep them from exercising their right to vote.

“In Maine, we saw people were afraid to leave their homes for groceries, to go to work or to go to school, because of fear of wrongful arrest and imprisonment,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who’s running for governor, told Blue Light News on Thursday. “If people are too afraid to go to the grocery store because armed ICE agents are patrolling the streets, that may increase fears about going to vote.”

Bellows said her office is preparing for next month’s special legislative election by ensuring voters are comfortable with absentee voting procedures, especially those in areas with large immigrant populations that have been impacted by ICE’s recent crackdown in the state.

Immigration enforcement activity near polling locations could dissuade those with noncitizen family members or voters of color, who fear being racially profiled, from turning out. And widespread deployments of immigration officers to battleground districts could cause chaos in key races and swing close elections.

The Trump administration dispatched about 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis to apprehend non-citizens in an operation that many in the state and elsewhere consider heavy-handed and excessive. The president and senior officials have indicated that the operation is about more than just law enforcement.

President Donald Trump called the Minnesota operation a “day of reckoning and retribution” and has tied the operation to welfare fraud in the state. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz demanding he turn over the state’s voter rolls, an action lawyers for the state of Minnesota described as a “shakedown” and a “ransom note.”

“The demand for the voter rolls tells you what this is really about,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who oversaw California’s elections for six years as secretary of state, told reporters Wednesday. “It’s about trying to rig the next election, and a desperate attempt to hold onto power.”

Federal law is explicit in banning “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” unless to “repel armed enemies of the United States[.]” Many local election officials also take great care to avoid spooking voters by placing law enforcement at polling places, and some states even have laws regulating this. Voter intimidation is illegal across the entire country.

But Trump has falsely and repeatedly claimed for more than a decade that millions of illegal immigrants vote in the U.S., arguing that was one factor in his 2020 loss. He also pledged before the 2020 election to send “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” to polling places.

Some Trump allies have openly described the possibility of deploying immigration enforcement officers to polling sites to ensure non-citizens do not vote.

“They’re petrified over at BLN and BLN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said during his show last August. “You’re damn right. … We’re not going to allow any illegal aliens to vote.”

Civil rights groups are preparing for the possibility that Trump exercises emergency powers to allow such a move.

Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, told reporters this week that the Trump administration is “using these violent ICE operations as a weapon” for political ends.

“[Trump] might try to use an executive order or his emergency powers in the 11th hour to interfere with the upcoming election, which is, of course, something that no president in American history has ever done, but something that we need to be prepared for,” Lydgate said Monday during a press briefing.

The Trump administration has continued its focus on election administration. On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta. Last week, the Justice Department revealed that DOGE employees were secretly communicating with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states” and may have used Social Security data to match voter rolls. Last week in Davos, Trump suggested prosecutions are forthcoming related to the 2020 election.

State election officials in both parties are anxious to see why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi will address the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday. A DHS spokesperson didn’t respond to request for comment for this story.

Nonprofit legal groups are already gearing up to challenge any efforts to intimidate voters around the November midterms, said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward.

“Litigation is going to remain an incredibly important guardrail,” said Perryman, whose nonprofit led one of the lawsuits against DOGE’s access to voter information. “And there are many cases that can be swiftly filed on an emergency basis, or even potentially proactively, in order to try to keep the communities as safe as possible.”

David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, warned that election officials across the country — from secretaries of state to local officers — are seeing “a level of federal interference in their work which is unconstitutional and unprecedented.”

“I want to stress how unusual this is,” Becker, a former DOJ civil rights attorney, told Blue Light News. “County election officials shouldn’t have to be thinking about what the president of the United States might say about elections.”

Those elections officials are working to instill trust in the electoral process, Becker said, and will encourage voters to utilize a variety of alternative ways to cast a ballot, such as early voting or voting by mail, depending on the state.

An attempt to heighten immigration enforcement before the election could just as easily backfire for Republicans. Trump is now under water on the immigration issue, with polls showing a majority of voters believe his deportation push went too far and want to see it reined in. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the Biden White House as an adviser on democracy and voting rights, pointed to high turnout in this week’s special elections for Minnesota legislature seats in Democratic-heavy districts, where Democrats romped.

“In places where there might be disruption, Minnesota is proving that you might well earn yourself a real significant backlash,” Levitt said.

But even talking about election suppression has a risk of discouraging voters, convincing them there is risk involved or that the elections might be rigged anyway. Conversely, talk of vote-rigging can do the same thing.

“Our fight right now is both to protect the security of our elections and people’s faith in them, because they’re deeply intertwined and they’re both under attack,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

Politics

Why Belgium’s prime minister isn’t cheering on the Red Devils

Published

3 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Ah, Belgium. The country of fries, chocolate, Kevin De Bruyne and, some might say, chronic political division.

Beyond Brussels, a mighty international melting pot, the country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and a small German-speaking community. Those linguistic divisions are mirrored in its politics: Belgium has separate party systems on either side of the language border, as well as a highly devolved federal structure that gives significant powers to its regions.

Today, Belgian politics is as fragmented as ever. It took 234 days to form a federal government after the June 2024 election (yes, you read that right). The delay was driven largely by the fact that no camp came close to winning a majority, forcing months of negotiations between parties with sharply different ideological and linguistic bases.

Flemish nationalism has also become a growing force, shaped by two right-wing nationalist parties: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which wants to transform Belgium into a looser confederal state and ultimately give Flanders far greater autonomy, and the far-right Vlaams Belang, which openly campaigns for Flemish independence.

So, you might think the 2026 World Cup would offer Belgium’s leader a rare opportunity to rally and unify the country behind a shared national symbol, right?

Wrong.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who hails from the N-VA party, has expressed almost no public support for the Red Devils, Belgium’s national soccer team.

That contrasts with leaders in nearby countries that also qualified for the World Cup. The leaders of the Netherlands, Germany and France have all publicly backed their squads, whether on social media or through public appearances.

The reason may be simple: De Wever just doesn’t care for the sport.

A Belgian official told Blue Light News: “The prime minister is not a soccer fan, so he doesn’t seek to project that image publicly. To do otherwise would not be authentic.”

Flemish media have indeed reported that the prime minister has little interest in soccer. In a podcast appearance a few years ago, he said the sight of people “going totally crazy in a group in the stands” left him feeling “ice cold.”

But politics is likely part of the story too. De Wever has led the Flemish nationalist N-VA since 2004. Throughout his political career, he has argued that Flanders should have far greater autonomy and that Belgium should evolve into a confederal state. For a politician with that background, overt displays of Belgian national unity probably don’t come naturally, and in fact contradict emphasis on Flemish autonomy.

This is not the first time the N-VA’s relationship with the Red Devils has attracted attention. In 2015, after Belgium reached No. 1 in the FIFA world rankings, Francophone Socialist Party leader Laurette Onkelinx asked the Chamber of Representatives to applaud the team. All parties joined in, except the N-VA.

During Euro 2016, the N-VA had to deny it instructed ministers and MPs to avoid publicly celebrating the Red Devils so as not to appear too Belgian, after rumors circulated in Belgian media.

One of De Wever’s few comments about this year’s World Cup concerned Belgium’s official tournament song. His complaint: It did not contain a single word of Dutch.

“My staff have confirmed to me that not a single word is sung in Dutch. That is, to put it mildly, not elegant,” he said, in keeping with his ideologies of promoting Flanders, when asked about the song during a parliamentary committee hearing.

Sport is often treated as a vehicle for national unity. In New Zealand, Belgium’s opponent in today’s match, elite teams have successfully woven elements of Māori culture into their sporting traditions, most famously through the prematch haka, which has helped create a shared cultural identity that connects Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders.

In Belgium, however, this World Cup has not yet become that kind of unifying project. At least not from the very top.

Politics

World Cup match collides with Florida GOP bash

Published

5 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

HOLLYWOOD, Florida — Colombia and Portugal’s World Cup match in Miami Gardens won’t be the only major draw pulling crowds to South Florida this weekend: Florida’s Republican grassroots are heading to Hollywood for their “Sunshine State Showdown.”

The GOP’s event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is one of the state party’s biggest of the year. The GOP sold more than 800 tickets, with the party’s most devoted volunteers and many donors coming in from all over the state to get revved up for the midterms, gameplan their messaging and hear directly from top candidates.

The shindig will feature speeches from Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as gubernatorial candidates Rep. Byron Donalds, former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. It will also include two congressional debates.

Several “Showdown” attendees said they were thrilled about the convergence of their party’s bash with a World Cup match. South Florida has already seen a huge economic boom in recent years, and the Magic City is poised to become even more prominent given Miami is set to be home to Donald Trump’s future presidential library and will host the G20 in December. “Miami is again at the center of the universe,” observed Miami-Dade County GOP Chair Kevin Cooper.

Several prominent Republicans said they see the international event as an opportunity to showcase the state. State Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville, who also chairs the Republican Party of Florida’s fundraising committee, said he’d enjoyed seeing fans from abroad show appreciation over social media for American culture. “They have fallen in love with the greatness of America,” Black said. “By being exposed to the Republican Party event, they will learn just how that greatness came to be.”

Collins’ team said that while the lieutenant governor wasn’t attending the game, he was “happy the state of Florida is hosting so many fans from across the world experiencing the beauty of our state.”

Former Fox 35 Orlando anchor Ryan Elijah, a GOP candidate for Congress who’s attending the showdown, said he would be checking his phone regularly for World Cup updates.

“What a night for Florida to see the biggest names in Florida politics and World Cup soccer be just miles apart!” he said in a text. “It’s a dream night for tourism numbers and local businesses!”

But the packed weekend also risks turning into a logistical headache. The Hard Rock Hotel is one of the pickup points offering shuttle services to Miami Stadium. It’s less than 9 miles away from the big game.

Angie Wong, Republican executive committeewoman in Miami-Dade, attended Wednesday’s match between Scotland and Brazil. She said her family paid $200 for parking near the stadium and that it took more than an hour just to get out of the parking lot.

“We were lucky — we actually left before the game ended,” she said.

Yet this year’s “Showdown” is a more scaled-back affair than in the recent past. It won’t, for example, feature a dinner like in previous years. But that’s probably good news for any attendees who don’t want to miss the soccer match — or who are just trying to get back home without getting stuck in traffic. And it doesn’t have any major Trump administration officials attending, in comparison to last year, when the event prominently featured White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and now-former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who is currently running Trump’s political operation for the midterms.

Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — who remains highly popular with the state’s grassroots — won’t be speaking at the “Showdown” this weekend and his office didn’t reply to an inquiry about whether he’d attend Saturday night’s game. The governor was in the Miami area during the last couple of days, including hitting the Brazil-Scotland game on Wednesday night and holding a press conference at the former Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention center on Thursday.

Evan Power, chair of the state party, had already arrived at the Hard Rock Hotel on Wednesday night and said he got to watch a Brazilian victory parade happening right outside the restaurant where he was having dinner. He added he hadn’t had any issues getting in and out of the events center and that Republicans sold out their room block, “so I think we were able to get in before the craziness.”

“In our room block, people are happy because they’re not paying the market rate that is out there,” Power said. “Seeing some of the prices — they’re crazy now.”

Politics

A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game FIFA can’t control

Published

6 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s “Pride Match” designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.

“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.

Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.

It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.

“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.

Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.

Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.