The Justice Department confirmed in a court filing late Wednesday that FBI and ICE agents will not be deployed as election monitors at polling places on Election Day, but that employees from other federal law enforcement agencies will serve as monitors.

“There will be no Federal Bureau of Investigation or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, much less agents, serving as monitors,” the Justice Department said in a declaration filed with the court. It added that one Customs and Border Protection employee will serve as a monitor on behalf of the Civil Rights Division “pursuant to detail and not as a representative” of the Department of Homeland Security.

The court filing came in response to a lawsuit against the Trump administration filed, in part by the NAACP, to block the Justice Department from deploying federal agents to polling places during the midterm elections.

The Justice Department also said that employees from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Prisons “will serve as monitors.” The declaration was filed by Eric Neff, acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, who has previously promoted false claims about the 2020 election.

“It’s not normal for those types of federal officials to serve as monitors,” Justin Levitt, a former DOJ attorney who helped oversee the election monitor program during the Obama administration, told MS NOW. “But they’re still just there only to observe, and can (and will) still be tossed out of the polls if they disrupt or disturb or intimidate.”

The Justice Department’s decision to pull employees from those agencies to act as monitors comes after the department announced in August it would deploy 1,000 federal monitors for the 2026 midterms. The announcement drew concern from Democratic lawmakers in Congress, and voting rights advocates over the scope of the operation and its potential for voter intimidation.

State election officials have told MS NOW that the federal election monitors are not their top concern when it comes to federal interference from the Trump administration. Monitors can be removed from polling sites if they are disruptive, and states determine the level of access federal poll monitors have to observe voting.

Levitt said the Justice Department is likely struggling to get to the 1,000 election monitors promised by Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Civil Rights Division, and is tapping ATF and DEA employees “as an attempt to get warm bodies.”

“Someone promised the boss 1,000 people, and then couldn’t come up with 1,000 people,” he said.

DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels previously told MS NOW that no other federal officials or federal law enforcement agents would accompany the DOJ monitors in their deployment at polling places. The election monitors will be DOJ attorneys and criminal prosecutors, the Justice Department told MS NOW.

Dispatching prosecutors as monitors is unusual, as typically only civil attorneys serve in that role.