The Franklin County board of elections building at 1700 Morse Street in central Columbus, Ohio, is an early voting site for next week’s midterms. It is also located in the middle of the large Somali American community that was targeted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s Operation Buckeye last December. The campaign was designed, the agency said, to find “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”

The result was a paltry number of arrests, months of sustained harassment, and a lingering feeling that ICE agents could return at any minute, especially around election time.

“Here in central Ohio, our early voting location is located in a neighborhood that's been the hardest hit by ICE, and it's an immigrant community neighborhood,” Liliana Rivera Baiman, an organizer with the 614 ICE Watch group and the Ohio Good Neighbor Network, tells WIRED. “So we knew that that neighborhood was at risk and that people were going to be going to vote there, and a lot of the community there, like our Somali community that can vote, our Latino community, they walk to the location.”

Baiman’s group is responding to the threats from the Trump administration to target immigrant communities during the midterms. Dozens of volunteers are already patrolling near early voting sites in Columbus every day, Baiman says, and the figure will rise to around 250 on Election Day. They have been trained to document, record, and report any sightings of federal immigration agents, sharing the information in dozens of Signal and WhatsApp groups.

Source link