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Immigrant rights groups in California are certain about two things: 1) President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to intimidate immigrants into not voting in the 2026 midterms; and 2) Only a concerted effort to reinforce those voters’ rights can ensure that the scheme doesn’t work.
With next Tuesday’s Election Day closing in, it’s impossible to know if the surge in federal anti-immigrant activity in California over the past few months will indeed produce a chilling effect on immigrant turnout.
But California has seen this movie before, including last year’s vicious ICE raids up and down the state. And what has developed out of that is a network of organizations coordinating their efforts to both protect immigrants and document federal overreach.
They’ve been busy for weeks and say they’ll continue over the next several days, reminding immigrants of their rights and encouraging those who are citizens to vote early if possible — the better to avoid potential Election Day voter suppression tactics by the Trump administration.
“Let us be clear: California will not be intimidated,” Jeannette Zanipatin, director of policy and advocacy for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said during a multiorganization news conference in Los Angeles earlier this month.
The point of the sudden increase in ICE raids, Zanipatin asserted, is to “silence immigrant communities, suppress civic participation and divide our neighborhoods. We reject this agenda.”
Although the Department of Homeland Security has not updated its arrest data since August, multiple reports and anecdotal accounts make it clear that ICE activity has increased in California over the past several weeks.
Among those actions was the arrest of 11 immigrants on Oct. 19 on charges that included being fraudulently registered to vote, with 28 people charged in all. (California has 23 million registered voters.) One of those arrested, a 72-year-old Belize man, was removed from his Commerce home in his pajamas and placed in federal custody in downtown Los Angeles.
Federal agents arrested more than 100 immigrants, many of them farmworkers, in and around the Fresno area of the Central Valley in early October. Local officials told KQED that the agents didn’t appear to have warrants, and they weren’t specifically targeting immigrants with criminal backgrounds or final deportation orders. Most of those arrested were merely heading for work or running errands.
A man in Woodland, near Sacramento, said he was struck by an ICE vehicle on Oct. 20 as he tried to film the sudden surge of federal immigration activity in his city, which has a large farmworker population. Department of Homeland Security officials that the man wasn’t struck, but rather “jumped on the hood of an ICE vehicle,” a version of events that Woodland police quickly said was contradicted by video evidence it reviewed.
Federal agents have been spotted repeatedly in immigrant neighborhoods in greater Los Angeles in recent weeks, with a heavy presence in the San Fernando Valley. And while ICE activity in the Bay Area has risen more gradually than dramatically, immigration lawyers there say violent arrests and arrests without valid warrants are surging.
In all cases, immigrant rights groups and elected officials see a pattern of intimidation designed to keep immigrants in fear of conducting even ordinary daily business, let alone showing up at a polling place to vote.
That is where organizations like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known commonly as CHIRLA, step in. CHIRLA’s workers blanket immigrant communities to remind citizens that they have a constitutional right to vote, but also that all residents of California, including those not eligible to vote, have basic rights if they’re confronted or shadowed by ICE.
The groups formed a coalition, Can’t Stop California, that has trained volunteers to observe polling places and ensure that nothing, and no one, is interfering with the voting process.
As for practical advice, the groups have encouraged immigrants to use any of the early voting processes available to them – by mail, in a local dropbox or in person at an early voting center. They’re also asking those who suspect ICE activity to document it if they can safely do so, and to report it to trusted community networks like the LA Rapid Response Network.
“Federal immigration agents are not above the law,” Martha Arévalo, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles (CARECEN), said at the early October news conference. CARECEN is another of the organizations connected with the effort to protect the rights of immigrants in California.
“We understand that [in] making you feel isolated and fearful, what they really want is to discourage you from voting and participating in the future of this nation,” Arévalo added. “Don’t allow that intimidation to silence you.”
The Trump administration has launched several attempts, legal and otherwise, to persuade Americans that the election process is contaminated by illegal voting practices, despite repeated studies showing the practice is exceedingly rare.
Many of these attempts have been foiled by their own stupidity, including government claims earlier this year that as many as 16,000 people in Nevada were voting illegally, when in fact the number turned out to be zero.
This week, Trump administration lawyers have been in court trying to prevent California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots from voters whose eligibility the administration questions — again, without presenting much in the way of hard evidence. Late Wednesday, the U.S. district judge hearing the case, David O. Carter, denied the government’s request, writing in part that the administration was attempting to “coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” violating multiple federal laws in the process.
Going after eligible voters who happen to be immigrants sets bar about as low as it can go. But left unchecked, the practice of intimidating immigrants could be darkly effective. California health experts observed a similar phenomenon during last year’s ICE raids, when they said many immigrant families stopped sending their kids to the doctor for fear that agents might come after an undocumented member of their family in the process. (School enrollments dropped off as well.)
It’s all the more reason, immigrant rights groups and elected leaders say, that they will continue to pound the pavement between now and Tuesday’s election, encouraging legal voters to exercise their right to cast ballots — and continue to dispel the Trump-driven myth of rampant illegal voting.
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