Trump’s Arresting State

Remember “Lock her up,” Donald Trump’s refrain in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. Remember the president’s January 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he suggested that Raffensperger was committing a criminal offense by refusing to “find” thousands of votes for Trump. The threats to arrest Clinton began before Trump had any control over the machinery of justice. The call with Raffensperger came just days before Trump was leaving office. But since his return to the Oval Office, the president and his administration have made threats of arrest a regular part of their repertoire. And not just of political opponents. He has used them as a tool to try to coerce public officials into cooperating with his agenda. In his administration, arrest threats are now a regular part of the policy process. We saw another example of that on Friday, July 17, when Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin followed up the president’s White House address on election security by threatening to jail local election officials who don’t help implement the president’s plan to nationalize control of elections and eliminate people from the voter rolls. Mullin used a press conference to say: “If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time.” The Constitution gives the authority to run and control elections to the states, and the president cannot abide that. As is typical in autocratic regimes, rival centers of power must be brought to heel, whether by persuasion or coercion. We may be tempted to write off the administration’s threats of arrest as tools of policy implementation, but before we do, we should remember M. Gessen’s rules for surviving autocracy. Rule #1: “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.” Just ask former Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Hannah Dugan, who was arrested in April 2025 on charges that she interfered with an arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was later convicted and resigned from the bench. Her lawyers got it right when, as PBS reports, “they argued that the Donald Trump administration sought to ‘crush’ Dugan in an effort to ensure judicial compliance with the ICE strategy of targeting immigrants as they showed up for court hearings.” In May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Rep. LaMonica McIver were arrested at a protest at an ICE detention center as they tried to obtain access to inspect conditions at the facility. One month later, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested by federal agents outside federal immigration court for “allegedly assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer while escorting a defendant out of immigration court.” “Being threatened by the prospect of heavy fines or incarceration, and being forced to needlessly defend oneself in court,” United to Protect Democracy explains, “can be a form of harassment in itself. Legal proceedings are emotionally taxing, time-consuming, stressful for families, and expensive.” Or as the New Yorker puts it, “The Administration’s political calculus seems aimed at punishing and intimidating Democrats who challenge the President’s agenda.” However, in the cases of Dugan, Lander, Baraka, and McIver, it could be argued that their arrests were unrelated to the duties of their offices. They were arrested for protesting administration policies. That would be bad enough. But Mullin upped the ante, threatening public officials not for protesting but for doing their jobs in ways that advance the president’s agenda. His threat did not just come out of the blue. Last year, the president targeted officials in so-called Sanctuary Jurisdictions and used an Executive Order to accuse them of engaging in “a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” He noted that “such nullification efforts often violate Federal criminal laws.” The president directed “the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security…[to] pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to end these violations and bring such jurisdictions into compliance with the laws of the United States.” But at that time, the administration was using arrest threats primarily in the context of its immigration crackdown. That changed last July when the Justice Department began to consider arrest to advance the president’s election security agenda. At the time, the New York Times observed that “such a path could significantly raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, thrusting the Justice Department and the threat of criminalization into the election system in a way that has never been done before.” The Times calls that effort “a novel and aggressive way to try to find chargeable crimes in a technically arcane topic, but one that is increasingly a political flashpoint as the president and his supporters have made unsubstantiated claims about election data manipulation.” In addition, the FBI website’s page about Election Crimes calls attention to the fact that “Election crimes become federal cases when…the crime involves an election official abusing his duties.” The example it offers, “let[ting] unqualified voters cast ballots.” The preparatory work by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security came to fruition on July 7 when election officials in all fifty states received letters from Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division. The letters warned them that they could be prosecuted for allowing noncitizens to remain on their lists of eligible voters. Dhillon was hardly subtle. Her letter cataloged various federal criminal statutes under which election officials might be arrested and prosecuted. It concluded by stating that “any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s SVRL or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability” and “encourag[ing]” state officials to “contact us to discuss what steps your state should take to maintain clean voter lists as required by law.” The “invitation,” backed by an ominous warning about criminal liability, is just the latest in a series of efforts by the administration to allow the federal government to meddle in election administration and to get states to comply with its directives. Because the courts have struck down most of those efforts, the administration is trying another route. During Mullin’s news conference, he outlined that route. As a prelude, the DHS Secretary repeated Trump’s allegations about noncitizen voting, praised states that have already complied with the administration’s directives, and denounced activist judges. When he was done, he left little to the imagination, promising that his department would bring “maximum pressure” to make sure that officials fall in line. Welcome to Trump’s arresting state.