On September 28, the President sat down with TIME at the White House, and the reporters asked him whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms. He said, "I don't rule anything out or in." He brought up the Insurrection Act himself, and when they confirmed that was what they meant, he said, "I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes." They asked whether he planned to send ICE agents to polling places, and he said he hadn't thought about it.
TIME published the transcript on Thursday, October 1, and what it tells us is that the man who commands the military was asked, thirty-six days before an election that could cost his party Congress, whether he would keep soldiers out of it, and he would not say yes.
I am not writing this to convince anyone it is real. If you are here, you have been watching this country get taken apart for almost two years, and you do not need me to argue you into it. I am writing because information is how we arm each other, and because I have a young son who is going to ask me what I did during these years, and I intend to have an answer.
In June 2025, he said he would "certainly" invoke the Insurrection Act over the protests against ICE in Los Angeles, and he said it again about Portland that October. In January of this year, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis, and when people protested, he threatened the Insurrection Act there too. In February, Steve Bannon said ICE would surround the polls in November. In August, a broadcaster named Wayne Allyn Root pitched him on declaring a national security emergency for elections. He has reached for the same law again and again when people stand up to him, and the people around him are saying the rest out loud.
There is a federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 592, that makes it a crime for anyone in the federal government, military or civilian, to send or station "troops or armed men" anywhere an election is being held. Congress passed it in 1865, during the Civil War, after Union soldiers had been posted at voting sites in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware, and the point of it was to stop soldiers from being used to intimidate voters. L.W. Powell, the Kentucky senator who introduced it, said the harshest punishment should fall on anyone who interferes with the vote, "whether he be President, major-general, or citizen." The original law allowed two exceptions, and in 1909 Congress removed the one that let troops be present to keep the peace at the polls. The only exception left today is when armed force is needed to fight off armed enemies of the United States.
The law is not only about soldiers. It says "troops or armed men," and it applies to civilians in federal service as well as the military, which is why the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at NYU, says it also bars armed federal agents like ICE from the places where we vote. Breaking it is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, and anyone who violates it is disqualified from holding federal office.
The Insurrection Act is a different law, the one that lets a president use the military inside the country under limited conditions, and it was last used in 1992. On September 30, the legal publication Lawfare published an analysis of both laws and concluded that invoking the Insurrection Act does not cancel the ban on armed forces at election sites. No court has ruled yet on how the two laws work together. What the courts have ruled on is his March 2026 executive order on elections, which two federal courts blocked on the grounds that the Constitution gives the states, and not the president, authority over elections.
This kind of threat is meant to make voters afraid enough to stay home. That is the same thing Congress was responding to in 1865, when senators heard testimony about soldiers standing guard at the ballot window while men who had come to vote were intimidated out of voting. And he does not have to send a single soldier for the threat to work. It works in the weeks before the election, while people are deciding whether voting is worth the risk, and the people most likely to decide it is not are our neighbors who already have the most reason to fear armed agents of this government.
If you have spent the past couple of years grieving what is being done to people in this country, and you are tired of being the only one at the table who says it out loud, you are not the only one, and this is where we find each other. Protect Democracy, which tracks threats to elections, says the machinery of this election has not been fundamentally changed, that states still run it, and that every one of these tactics depends on people going along with it. We do not go along with it, and refusing together, in numbers, is what rebellion looks like.
Check your registration today at vote.org, and then check on your people, because deadlines are set by each state. Vote early if your state allows it, which 47 of them do, or by mail, which 36 allow for any voter, and get a mailed ballot out at least six to seven days ahead or into a drop box. Go together and fill the car, and know that the person riding with you does not have to be a registered voter. Before you post that ICE is at a polling place, make sure it is true.
Put these numbers in your phone now and text them to someone. They are the Election Protection hotlines, and they are who you call if armed federal agents show up where you vote.
1-866-OUR-VOTE (English)
1-888-VE-Y-VOTA (Spanish)
1-888-API-VOTE (Asian languages)
1-844-YALLA-US (Arabic)
If agents are there, tell the election workers, call the hotline, and write down how many there were, what they were doing, where they stood, what was on their uniforms, what time it was, and whether they were armed.
The people who wrote that law were living through a war and still decided armed men had no place where people vote. On November 3, we hold that line with our ballots and with each other, and on November 4 we keep going, because one election is not the whole fight and none of us are doing this alone.
