Why MAGA’s threat to 'surround the polls' persists despite being illegal: experts

When far-right MAGA Republican Steve Bannon, host of the "War Room" vodcast and former White House chief strategist in the first Trump Administration, called for militarized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to "surround the polls" in the 2026 midterms, some of his critics dismissed the comments as over-the-top "trolling." Bannon, they argued, often says outrageous things to get attention.

But elections lawyer and Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias is warning that it's a mistake to not to take such threats from Bannon and other MAGA Republicans seriously.

In a Q&A interview published by Slate on February 10, Elias told journalist/attorney Dahlia Lithwick, "I don't think (Bannon is) trolling us. I think he's quite serious. I think Donald Trump wants to maintain optionality here. Trump has put federal paramilitary forces in a number of American cities. Everyone's focused on Minneapolis, but let's be clear: it's not only Minneapolis. Part of it is because he obviously has an anti-immigrant agenda he wants to pursue, but he also wants to normalize the idea of seeing people with flashbang grenades and teargas breaking windows and dragging people out of cars, and telling U.S. citizens that they're being put in databases, and grabbing U.S. citizens and throwing them in the back of vans."

Elias continued, "Trump wants to normalize all of that because that has a number of side benefits, none so great as potentially using those same forces and same tactics around the midterm elections — not to go after non-citizens, and not even specifically focused on being right around polling places, but just more generally making it more intimidating to vote, making it more inconvenient to get to polling locations, and in its most extreme form, yes, surrounding polling locations and intimidating people or preventing voting altogether."

During the interview, Lithwick pointed out that according to the New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, it is a crime for the military to interfere with elections.

"So doesn't this discussion begin and end with the fact that you just can't?," Lithwick asked Elias.

But the Elias Law Group founder responded, "It doesn't, for two reasons."

"First of all," Elias told Lithwick, "we began the administration with people thinking: Oh my God, what if he puts the military at the polls? And I think Donald Trump has figured out that he's better off with paramilitary forces than the actual U.S. military. The military may be too disciplined and too principled to do what he wants here, so he's found other federal law enforcement personnel and agencies willing to do his dirty work. We've seen that progression between L.A. — where we saw the National Guard deployed — and now Minneapolis, where we've seen ICE and Border Patrol."

Elias continued, "More fundamentally, though, what you have is a president who himself enjoys absolute immunity and will wield the pardon power, and that makes saying something is 'illegal' a lot less of a credible threat. When you also have a Department of Justice that would never prevent them from doing those things, and in fact would go to court to enable those things.… it doesn't take law off the table. And I never want people to think that the courts are not able to address some of these things, because I think, in fact, the courts have proven the most capable of being checks on Donald Trump."