Election officials express alarm after ICE confronts poll worker over social media post 

Local election officials in Upstate New York said they were frustrated and alarmed by two federal immigration agents confronting a poll worker over a social media post at a voting site in Syracuse during the state’s primaries earlier this week.

Kevin Ryan, Onondaga County’s Republican elections commissioner, told Democracy Docket he believed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents should not have entered the polling place.

“There was no emergency. They weren’t investigating an ongoing crime. There was no threat to public safety,” Ryan said.

A day earlier, Dustin Czarny, Ryan’s Democratic counterpart in the county, told Democracy Docket that “people are scared” by what happened.

News of the incident broke when Paigelynne Gonyea, who was managing a voting site Tuesday, published a video on social media of two ICE agents arriving at the polling location to warn her to delete her social media account. They claimed she had broken federal law by sharing information about a federal agent involved in a fatal Minnesota shooting earlier this year.

In a series of posts, Gonyea said the agents had initially arrived at her home. After they reached her by phone, she invited them to come speak with her at the voting site. 

Gonyea was not available to comment by publication time.

The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) told Democracy Docket it’s reviewing a report on the alarming incident.

Ryan expressed frustration that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) went after Gonyea over a post.

“I’ve been practicing law for 30 years. I’m not so sure this can even be characterized as doxxing the federal agent,” he said. So why they felt the need to go in there six months after the fact, I just don’t know.”

“She didn’t doxx the guy. His name was already out in the public forum. She didn’t identify any other personal details about the guy,” he added. “This is what you choose to drive from New Jersey for? To issue a warning notice to this individual, really?”

Though Ryan thought Gonyea did nothing wrong in her post, he criticized her for inviting the agents to the polling site. As a trained election worker, he said she should have known better. 

“I think she invited them in to try to create a situation designed to give herself some publicity and cast Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a bad light,” he said.

Gonyea wrote online that she invited the agents because she did not feel comfortable speaking with them alone and because she was unable to leave her work during an ongoing election. She also said that she did not want to become “the story” and is instead speaking out to raise awareness for election workers and the protection of freedom of speech and civil liberties.

The incident occurred as prominent far-right figures have called on President Donald Trump to take drastic actions to influence the outcome of the upcoming midterms, including deploying troops and federal agents to polling places. The White House has never definitively ruled out that tactic.

Despite ICE entering the poll site to confront Gonyea, Ryan said he doesn’t believe Onondaga County voters needed to worry about agents showing up to the polls in future elections.

He said he believed the incident was likely a “comedy of errors” — and he initially thought it was a hoax. Ryan only discovered it wasn’t after reaching out to one of his connections at the Department of Homeland Security, an official who, coincidentally, had been with the agents at Gonyea’s home earlier that day.

Ryan said the agents, who he said were from New Jersey, may have been unaware that they could potentially violate state law by entering the site, though he noted there are also federal statutes governing police and troops at the polls.

Czarny said that, given the rhetoric around the upcoming elections, he feared the situation could heighten fears of federal law enforcement interference.

“Even before this incident, I’ve been concerned about this,” Czarny said. 

Beyond worrying election officials, the confrontation between the agents and Gonyea has also caught the attention of national freedom of speech groups, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties across the U.S.

In a statement Thursday, Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney with FIRE, denounced the ICE agent’s actions.

“A free America doesn’t dispatch federal law enforcement agents to intimidate someone for an Instagram post of publicly available information,” Steinbaugh said. “Free speech is the bedrock of a free society, and the First Amendment squarely prohibits ICE agents from intimidating Americans for nothing more than repeating information from a newspaper report.”

The ACLU of New York also said in a social media post that the confrontation was “a scare tactic, meant to chill free speech.”

“People should continue to speak out and demand law enforcement accountability for the kinds of egregious abuses we’ve seen from ICE – including the killing of Renee Good,” it added.

Since the incident, Gonyea said she has been exploring her legal options and started a GoFundMe for “potential legal costs.”