DHS sends armed agents to California doors to terrorize voters

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · October 21, 2026

Federal agents are knocking on doors to intimidate immigrant communities, mounting a cruel political campaign that the courts and state election officials must forcefully reject.

The boots at the door are meant for everyone who sounds like us

You can trace the terror straight from the doorstep of an elder in his pajamas back to the desks where men in suits manufacture a crisis out of thin air. In cities like Long Beach and Commerce, armed agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have turned civic life into an occupying force. As CBS News reports, these federal agents have knocked on doors in several states to question residents about their immigration status and past voting history. This isn't law enforcement. It is a political intimidation campaign, pure and simple. It has a long, ugly history in this country. This armed door-knocking campaign uses the full, crushing weight of the federal state to create a climate of fear.

Federal agents dragged lawful permanent resident Omar Muñoz from his home in Commerce in his pajamas. They weren't securing an election. They were sending a message to every naturalized citizen and green card holder across the country. Walking to a ballot box is now treated as a dangerous act. The Department of Justice announced that 156 people have been charged with voting-fraud related offenses since the beginning of the Trump administration. That is a drop in the ocean among 227 million registered voters. Los Angeles officials analyzed a sample from the Department of Justice list of suspected non-citizens. As The Guardian details, those with meaningful birthplace information were born in the United States. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta rightly called these cases a drop in the bucket. Los Angeles County election officials declared the federal list completely unreliable, as NPR notes. Yet Acting U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter pushed forward anyway. He demanded that California segregate ballots on an impossible deadline while admitting, with casual cruelty, that "we're not perfect."

A faulty machinery built to hunt ghosts and silence neighbors

The architects of this farce claim they are merely protecting the ballot box from illegal voters. A DHS spokesperson echoed DHS Secretary Mullin's baseless assertions. Eric Balliet is a former Homeland Security Investigations agent. He told CBS News that in all his decades on the job, he never once saw special agents sent to private residences to verify voter eligibility. HSI is an arm of ICE meant to investigate money laundering and drug smuggling. Yet agents were pulled off those cases for a political surge. USCIS employees were given quotas to investigate subjects on tight deadlines. As Jessica Marsden of Protect Democracy points out, the federal government is inserting itself into state voter rolls in an unprecedented way. The operation is designed to scare lawful voters from participating.

The Guardian reports that 71 percent of the sample in Los Angeles never even voted. Another 43 percent had already cancelled their registrations. When Nevada officials investigated a similar DHS claim on their rolls, every single one of them turned out to be a U.S. citizen. The machinery is broken by design because the goal was never accuracy. The goal is a chilling effect. Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University warns that naturalized citizens will stay away from the voting booth. The regime makes no distinction between the innocent and the targeted. We saw this exact mechanism at work during Japanese American Internment. The state used a manufactured security threat to justify the mass surveillance and criminalization of a specific ethnic group, regardless of citizenship, to instill fear and crush their political power. The names change, but the machinery of racialized suspicion remains greased and ready.

The cruelty is the point, and the courts must stop it

No one stumbles into a voter registration form by accident. As UCLA law professor Rick Hasen notes, people frequently register by mistake at the DMV. A crime requires willful violation of the law. Yet federal prosecutors hauled in people in California under Operation Protect the Vote. They arrested Mexican national José Antonio Bañuelos-Díaz on his way to work in his landscaping vest. They charged El Salvador native Ana Domínguez, who stated she never registered and never voted. As Lliani Orantes, the daughter of Omar Muñoz, told the Los Angeles Times, her father's arrest was a political ploy. It was used to instill fear in society. This is the bitter fruit of the security state that grew fat after 9/11, now turned inward to chew on our neighbors. We are watching the federal government weaponize bad data to suppress the voices of people who work the fields, clean the hotel rooms, and build the cities of this borderland.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are entirely wrong to terrorize immigrant communities for political gain. They must be stopped by the courts. Civil rights groups like Protect Democracy are right to sue these agencies. California election officials are entirely right to refuse their unlawful demands to purge unverified voters. Justice requires that these manufactured criminal charges be dropped. HSI agents must be sent back to actual criminal investigations. Every naturalized citizen must be guaranteed the right to cast a ballot without looking over their shoulder for men with badges and clipboards.

DHS sends armed agents to California doors to terrorize voters

The boots at the door are meant for everyone who sounds like us

A faulty machinery built to hunt ghosts and silence neighbors

The cruelty is the point, and the courts must stop it

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