Massive Groups of Volunteers Are Ready to Face Down ICE at the Polls

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...

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