Thursday, October 1, 2026
It sounds reasonable. Almost self-evident. And it has become a familiar response to concerns about increasingly aggressive government enforcement. Why worry about ICE? If you’re a citizen, if you’re here legally, what’s the problem? Why object to greater scrutiny of voter rolls? If you’re legally eligible to vote, you have nothing to fear.
Except that isn’t how government power works.
The statement assumes that only people who have done something wrong will ever be questioned, investigated, detained or frightened. Innocent people, apparently, will somehow be recognized as innocent before anyone bothers them.
But being innocent doesn’t prevent the government from suspecting you of wrongdoing, or even arresting you. The government may target people not because they have committed a crime, but to make examples of them, intimidate others, or silence those they regard as troublesome or subversive.
Sometimes suspicion begins with little more than how someone looks or speaks. And once you become a suspect, your innocence doesn’t protect you from being stopped, questioned, searched, detained or required to prove who you are. Being innocent may determine how an encounter with government ends. It doesn’t guarantee that the encounter never begins.
That matters as we approach the midterm elections.
The Trump administration has undertaken an extraordinary effort to identify noncitizens who may have voted illegally. The justification is election integrity. According to the administration, illegal voting is at epidemic proportions.
But the numbers tell another story. ProPublica recently examined the administration’s effort. Federal searches generated tens of thousands of potential leads involving suspected illegal voting. Homeland Security Investigations agents were sent out to pursue them. Between January 2025 and May 2026, just 41 people were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. More than 150 million Americans voted in the last presidential election. Tens of thousands of leads. Forty-one charges.
So perhaps the more important question isn’t what should happen to illegal voters. It is what’s going to happen to legal voters.
What happens when an American citizen has a name that sounds “foreign”? What happens when an eligible voter speaks accented English, has brown skin, wears clothing associated with another culture, or simply worries that a government database may contain incorrect information? Those voters may have done absolutely nothing wrong, but they still have plenty to worry about.
The concern becomes more serious when immigration enforcement moves from voter records to polling places. President Trump was asked whether he would send National Guard troops or ICE officers to polling locations during the midterms. His answer was that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”
But federal law sharply restricts such activity. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that federal law prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed to election sites, and prohibits government officials from intimidating voters.
The reality, however, is that ICE agents need never appear inside a single polling place to make voters fear for their freedom and safety.
Imagine that you’re a naturalized citizen. Or that your parents are immigrants. Or that someone in your household has unresolved immigration issues. You hear repeatedly that ICE may be involved in election enforcement, and that federal agents are examining voter files. You see news reports about investigations of suspected noncitizen voters.
On Election Day, do you vote? Or do you decide that one vote isn’t worth the possibility of attracting attention, or being wrongfully arrested even if you’re 100 percent eligible to vote?
That’s what makes the nothing-to-worry-about argument so dangerous. It reverses the relationship between citizens and their government. It means that government may scrutinize, investigate and intimidate whomever it wishes, and innocent people should simply trust that everything will eventually work out.
That isn’t freedom. A right doesn’t disappear only when the government formally takes it away. It can also be weakened, or effectively eliminated, when exercising it feels dangerous. A government doesn’t have to prevent someone from voting if it can make that person afraid to vote.
“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Maybe so. But in a free country, citizens shouldn’t have to prove their innocence before they can exercise their rights without fear. Government should exercise its power without making innocent people afraid to exercise theirs.
Michael Blitz is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
