Department of Homeland Security official Heather Honey told a call of state election officials that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will not show up at the polls during the 2026 midterm elections and anyone who says they will is spreading disinformation, according to two officials who were on the call.
Honey, an election denier who backed President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and has since been appointed to work on election security, was representing DHS on a Wednesday call organized by five executive branch agencies involved in protecting and monitoring elections. She made the statement in response to a question about the presence of ICE at the polls as an intimidating factor, per Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Adrien Fontes.
“She came out with a very strong statement and she acknowledged, flat out, that anybody saying that ICE would be at the polling places was spreading disinformation,” Fontes told HuffPost.
Many Trump allies have either called for ICE to show up at the polls or stated that there would be nothing wrong with it, raising concerns from advocates that ICE would be used to intimidate potential voters.
“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said on his podcast on Feb. 4.
But Fontes said that he believed the choice of messenger undermined the message, citing Honey’s background as an activist who advanced lies to overturn Arizona’s elections in 2020 and 2022.
“She’s the absolute wrong messenger to guarantee to us that ICE is not going to be at polling places,” Fontes said. “When I heard it, I was kind of flabbergasted at first that she would come right out and be so strong with that statement. And then I realized it was her and so I knew I couldn’t believe it.”
DHS did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the subject.
Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
Honey has previously made false assertions about DHS election policy. On a similar call with state election officials in 2025, Honey said that DHS was not using voter registration data from states that complied with Trump’s executive order requiring them to share their full voter rolls, according to Democracy Docket. This contradicted previous statements from DHS.
Still others on the call hope that this is a real statement of policy from the agency.
“I was encouraged by the pledge that ICE agents would not be in and around polling places,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told HuffPost. ”We assume that this is a pledge that all Americans can count on.”
While Honey said that ICE would not appear at the polls, she and the Department of Justice representative refused to affirm that the Constitution gives the states ultimate control over running their elections, absent legislation from Congress, according to Fontes. Trump has tried to claim otherwise with his executive orders to mandate voter identification and proof of citizenship, among other things. These orders have all been halted in courts.
“That was really, really disturbing,” Fontes said.
The rest of the call, which is normally held ahead of elections, was routine as federal agencies shared the services they can provide and how to coordinate with them to counter threats at polling locations and investigate civil rights violations.