U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says it arrested a Haitian national and former Temporary Protected Status recipient in mid-September as part of an operation built around allegations of noncitizen voting, but the agency’s own public account stops short of saying he voted, naming no charge, no statute, and no evidence.
ICE’s Boston field office said officers detained Fisher Merone on September 15 during what it calls “Operation Ballot Shield.” In a statement posted September 30, the office described Merone as an “illegal alien” and a former holder of Temporary Protected Status from Haiti — the federal designation that lets people from certain countries in crisis live and work in the United States for a limited time. ICE said it “will continue to identify, arrest, and remove” people it accuses of having voted or registered to vote illegally, and framed the operation as advancing the priorities of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the Trump administration’s public-safety agenda.
The agency did not provide the substance that would ordinarily accompany such a claim.
As the original report on the arrest noted, ICE’s posts cited no specific statute and pointed to no pending charge in Merone’s case. An immigration arrest is an administrative action, not a criminal conviction, and CTN could not independently establish whether Merone has been charged with any voting-related offense, whether he is accused of registering, of casting a ballot, or neither beyond his immigration status.
That gap matters, because the premise of the operation — noncitizen voting — is among the most studied and least substantiated claims in American elections. Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and illegal registration or voting can carry criminal penalties in addition to immigration consequences. But investigations have repeatedly found the practice, in the words of the Brennan Center for Justice, “vanishingly rare.” Reviews of past elections have turned up only a handful of suspected noncitizen votes out of millions cast, a pattern confirmed by election officials across party lines and by multiple independent fact-checks.
Merone was arrested during a months-long escalation of federal immigration enforcement in Massachusetts, where ICE has reported more than 1,400 arrests in September alone under a broader operation in the Boston area. State officials, including Gov. Maura Healey, have pressed the agency for transparency about who is being detained and why.
Much about the case is still unclear from the agency’s posts.
ICE did not say where Merone was arrested, whether he has legal representation, where he is being held, or what will happen next in his case. It did not say when the voting or registration it alleges occurred, or in which election. Nor did it explain how his former TPS status — a lawful status while it lasted — relates to the voting allegation at the center of the operation named in the announcement.
CTN will update this report as more information becomes available.
Source:
https://ctninfo.com/?p=44794&preview=true
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