First Draft: 🗳️ ICE to the... Polls?
Republicans are starting to salivate at the idea of sending masked secret police to the polls, 'Donald the Dove' might plunge us into another major war, and former Prince Andrew arrested.
🚨BREAKING: Police in the UK have just arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, over suspicions of misconduct in public office. The accusation is that he shared confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a British trade envoy. So, is anyone ever going to get arrested over Epstein ties here in the United States??
Hi, all! It’s Swin again, and today I’m going to begin by giving you a tiny peek into how the News Sausage gets made. My old boss at Mother Jones magazine, David Corn, used to tell me: “News is just shit that people forgot.” To a certain extent, he was right. Furthermore, too often we political reporters learn so much, gain too much familiarity with a topic, or drown ourselves in conversations with our sources that we forget that what we assume is common knowledge often, well, isn’t. I made that mistake recently, and I’m here to correct it. Stick with me now…
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we dive into how “serious” Team Trump is about deploying ICE paramilitaries to your local polling station, the potential full-blown war with Iran sitting around the corner, and why, oh why, so many Trump officials think demoted Border Patrol “commander” Greg Bovino is embarrassingly “horny” on the internet.
Yes, They Do Want to Send ICE to the Polls
Earlier this month, after former Trump aide Steve Bannon said that “we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Zeteo politics editor Andrew Perez asked me if I could do some reporting to see how much Bannon was mouthing off versus how much this was actually being discussed in the corridors of power in Donald Trump’s Washington. I told him: Why bother? Bannon was probably just regurgitating reporting he’d seen last year about how these ideas were being kicked around within the Trump-Vance administration. Andrew asked me what the hell I was talking about, as we did a quick Google dive and couldn’t find the New York Times (or whatever legacy media outlet) report that I swore already existed.
I had been hearing about this since early last year, not that long after Trump was inaugurated. I remember thinking that this topic was common (political) knowledge and that others in the media had beaten me to the punch of publicly reporting it. But in the event that I’ve been woefully mistaken for nearly a year, here’s me making amends.
Ever since the early months of the second Trump era, several well-placed sources – Trump appointees in the government, other MAGA diehards close to the White House – relayed to me private conversations happening in the upper tiers of the federal government about potentially sending armed ICE agents to US polling places, during the 2026 midterms or other elections. Some of these on-again-off-again conversations – preliminary and casual as some of them were – happened with President Trump in the room or at the table.
To some of MAGAworld’s most prominent anti-immigration zealots, the logic (or, authoritarian and racist wish-casting, depending on who you ask) went: The president has been saying for a long time that “the illegals” are voting in massive numbers and hence rigging elections for the Democrats. It makes no sense NOT to send ICE agents to polling places during critical elections.
It goes without saying that the GOP’s persistent claim that undocumented voters are swinging elections all over the place to the Dems is all a bunch of bullshit that isn’t happening, and that Trump and his party are the ones working overtime to steal and rig elections. Trump’s federal goon squad showing up, possibly with loaded guns, at or near your local polling station – even just to stand there and stare – would be nothing short of thuggish, corrupt voter intimidation tactics, especially given what we know they’re capable of doing both to citizens and noncitizens.