Le[e]gal Brief With Lee Merritt: Can ICE Interfere With Elections?
Welcome to your weekly Le[e]gal Brief with Lee Merritt, Esq. In addition to taking aim at the Trump administration’s apparent beef with the Second Amendment, this week’s episode also breaks down how President Donald Trump may use ICE to interfere with the midterm election.
“Every American…has the right to bear arms. In its original form, the Second Amendment was created to encourage well-ordered citizen militias to be available to oppose federal or state tyranny,” Merritt explains in the video. “Recently, Donald Trump and his administration have criticized a legally armed American citizen, Alex Pretti, for doing just that.”
The shooting death of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minnesota has triggered concerns about his constitutional rights being violated. “Agents are not justified in using deadly force just because Pretti was armed,” Merritt explains. “To justify deadly force, officers must show that he posed an immediate, deadly threat to officers or others at the moment they fired.”
As millions of us have seen the video by now, it’s clear that at no point in being pepper-sprayed, pinned to the ground, and beaten by several federal agents did Pretti pose a deadly threat to the officers who shot him 10 times in the back.
Merritt also pushes back against the narrative being pushed by the Trump administration that Pretti was a paid agitator. “Let me be clear: agitation, civil disobedience, and organized disruptive protests are not illegal and cannot be used as a blanket justification for officially sanctioned violence.”
The images of ICE agents pepper-spraying protesters at point-blank range, indiscriminately arresting people, and fatally shooting two unarmed U.S. citizens have turned the majority of the country against the agency. As ICE’s lawlessness has intensified in tandem with the Trump administration’s attempts to seize voter rolls, there have been growing concerns that these ICE raids are actually just a test run for how Trump plans to utilize the agency during the midterm elections.
“Just hours after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota demanding their unredacted voter rolls,” Merritt explains. “Bondi tied these demands to ending the turmoil in the city. Implying that if Minnesota played ball on voter data, the federal occupation might ease.”
In addition to demanding Minnesota’s voter rolls, the FBI raided a Fulton County warehouse and seized official voting records related to the 2020 election. Trump has refused to accept his loss in the 2020 election and has continually claimed that millions of undocumented people are voting in our elections. Trump has yet to provide any proof of his claims, with the few documented instances of election fraud usually being small-scale and often being committed by Republicans. Trump has never let facts get in the way of his feelings, though, so there’s legitimate concern that Trump will use voter fraud as a pretense to deploy ICE to voting sites in an effort to intimidate Black and brown voters.
“The message is simple. If you show up to vote, you may have to prove you belong under the eye of federal agents,” Merritt explains. “This is not about protecting elections. It’s about using fear to steal them.”
SEE ALSO: