The Board of Elections at 1700 Morse Street in downtown Columbus, Ohio, is an early-voting site for next week’s midterm elections—and sits in the middle of a large Somali American community targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Operation Buckeye last December. Although the operation produced a small number of arrests, several months of persistent harassment have left residents worried that ICE agents could return, particularly around election time.
Concerns around an early-voting site
ICE said Operation Buckeye was intended to find “the worst illegal alien of the worst criminals.” The operation targeted the Somali American community around the Columbus voting site, according to reporting cited in the source.
“Our early voting locations here in central Ohio are in neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by ICE and are also neighborhoods of immigrant communities,” Liliana Rivera Byman, an organizer with the 614 ICE Watch Group and the Ohio Good Neighbor Network, told WIRED. “So we knew that that neighborhood was at risk, and that people were going to vote there, and that a lot of the communities there, including the Somali community and the Latino community, who could vote, were going to walk to that location.”
Byman’s group is responding to what it describes as threats from the Trump administration to target immigrant communities during the midterm elections. Dozens of volunteers are already patrolling Columbus early-voting locations each day, Byman said. That number is expected to grow to about 250 on Election Day.
The volunteers are trained to document, log and report sightings of federal immigration agents. They share that information through dozens of Signal and WhatsApp groups.
“We teach people that they need to observe behavior. We show them what to look out for, what ICE looks like, this is the type of uniform that agents wear, these are the types of vehicles they drive,” Byman said. “We give them an example so they can get used to what they see.”
Nationwide election-monitoring networks
Similar efforts are taking place in towns and cities across the country. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen people involved in the work. Their organizations are coordinating against what they view as an existential threat to American democracy.
The response includes training sessions led by national organizations such as Common Cause, the American Civil Liberties Union and Indivisible, as well as local groups including Living United for Change in Arizona and NorCal Resist. These organizations train volunteers to document and record ICE operations, understand voters’ rights and prepare for worst-case scenarios.
DHS says polling places are not being targeted
The Department of Homeland Security has officially said that ICE does not plan to send agents to polling places on Election Day. “ICE does not plan operations targeting polling places,” a DHS spokesperson told WIRED.
The spokesperson added, “ICE conducts targeted enforcement operations based on intelligence, and if an active threat to public safety endangers a polling place, those targeted enforcement operations may result in arrests.”
Source: www.wired.com
