While ICE publicly threatened to arrest anyone voting illegally, its own agents were privately given a radically opposing instruction: to suspend all immigration operations during the election day on Tuesday.
This was revealed by an investigation from The Intercept published on Wednesday, based on testimonies from agency officials in different regions of the country.
The directive began circulating on the Monday prior through internal chats and verbal orders from frontline supervisors within the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division of ICE, without any official email or public announcement.
“They told us that all operations were canceled for Election Day. It was word of mouth, from our frontline supervisors, without any official notice by mail,” declared an ICE official operating in the southern part of the country who requested anonymity to The Intercept.
Esta revelación sobre las operaciones de ICE es parte de un panorama migratorio en constante cambio. Sigue todos los detalles en nuestra sección de
An agent from the Great Lakes region described the measure as a "national day without law enforcement" and explained that deportation officers who typically conduct street operations were reassigned to office duties: "I will be having coffee in the office for the first time in a year."
ICE officials in four regions—northeast, Midwest, north, and south-central—confirmed to the media that they had received the same instruction to suspend operations.
The data from the community monitoring platforms supported the testimonies. Sherman Austin, creator of StopICE.net, noted that Tuesday was "the day with the least activity observed from ICE ERO throughout the year," with the usual peak of operations absent between five and ten in the morning.
The AntiFreeze platform recorded only 56 sightings across the country, "one of the quietest Tuesdays we’ve seen," according to its developer.
Rapid response activists in Minnesota and Southern California confirmed that there were no street arrests.
The contrast with the public message from the agency on the same day is striking. ICE posted on its official X account the warning: "If you vote illegally, we will find you. We will locate you, detain you, and prosecute you. There will be no way to escape."
On Wednesday, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, announced that “deportations will continue” and stated that ICE operates “365 days a year.” He also claimed that during the election day, ICE arrested individuals with previous convictions for serious offenses, although he did not provide verifiable numbers.
The exact origin of the internal order has not been confirmed. Some officials believe it came from the ERO leadership and not directly from the White House, and The Intercept points out that no command at the level of Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer issued a formal directive.
In the elections, the Democrats gained control of both chambers of Congress. Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar retained her seat in Florida's 27th district by just 1,116 votes and attributed the electoral punishment to the Hispanic vote that rejected the indiscriminate deportations of Latino workers with no criminal records.
For the Cuban community in Miami, the electoral pause has ended, and the implications are concrete: between 400,000 and 500,000 Cubans have an I-220A form in the United States, and more than 42,000 have active deportation orders.
The judicial restrictions that a federal judge had imposed on certain DHS operations in nine states automatically expired when the polls closed on Tuesday, meaning that ICE regained full operational capacity.
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