ICE makes post threatening immigrants on election day: 'we will track you'

Amid the "midterms", midterm elections taking place in the United States this Tuesday (3), the US Immigration and Customs Service, ICE, published a message threatening those who "vote illegally".

"If you vote illegally, we will find you. We will track you, arrest you and prosecute you. There will be no escape," said the post posted on the social network X.

In North American elections, however, illegal immigrants cannot vote.

The US government's official page, which brings together election rules, states that "people who are not citizens, including legal permanent residents, cannot vote in federal, state, and most local elections."

In other words, not even foreign residents who have regular documentation can participate in the elections, with American citizenship being the gateway to voting in the USA.

The Trump administration, however, has invested in the narrative against voting by non-citizens, even though these cases are rare in the USA.

On Monday (2), the country's Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the federal government to disregard around 20,000 votes from the state of California. The allegation was that the votes were not from American citizens.

The Trump administration had asked the court that the disputed votes in California be separated until the voters' citizenship could be verified.

Despite denying the request, the Supreme Court did not detail the reasons for the decision, as is common in emergency trials.

Since taking office for the second term, Donald Trump has announced an attack against illegal immigrants in the USA, initiating a series of hunts, detentions and deportations of foreign citizens living illegally in North American territory in all states of the country.

According to data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), responsible for implementing the Trump administration's anti-immigration policy, in August 2026 alone, 50,925 immigrants were detained by ICE agents, a record for the Republican administration.

The number, however, remains below the target established at the beginning of the second term. Upon taking office in February 2025, Trump promised that ICE would detain 1 million illegal immigrants per year until the end of his administration.

In 2025, there were 328 thousand arrests, according to the authorities themselves.

According to data from the Brazilian Federal Police and the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship (MDHC), 3,294 Brazilians were expelled from the USA in 2025, a number practically double compared to the previous year, before the start of the Trump administration.

The Deportation Observatory, a project at the State University of Montes Claros (MG), estimates that, by August 2026, 3,650 Brazilians have already been detained by the American Immigration Service.

The report uses data obtained via the American Access to Information Act from the Deportation Data Project, which belongs to the US government.