This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 7 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”

With less than 30 days until Election Day, new reporting offers evidence that a desperate Donald Trump, facing a likely midterm defeat for his party, has turned to an authoritarian tool he has been cultivating since retaking the presidency.

In his second term, Trump has sought to transform Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His so-called “one big, beautiful bill” funneled $75 billion in new funding to the agency — more than the total military spending of several countries, including France, Japan and South Korea.

He has allowed ICE officers to wear masks and operate anonymously, shielding agents from scrutiny and accountability.

He has deployed ICE to carry out sweeping immigration operations in Democratic-led cities, such as Los Angeles and Chicago. In Minneapolis earlier this year, the number of federal immigration agents deployed to the city outnumbered the local police force. And untrained ICE agents have repeatedly used violence against citizens and noncitizens alike.

Now, as the clock ticks toward Election Day, long-standing fears that ICE will escalate its intimidation tactics appear to be bearing out. Trump has spent months laying the groundwork, pushing bogus, repeatedly debunked claims about noncitizen voting. The fear has always been that this nonsense would serve as a pretext for deploying ICE to intimidate voters or meddle in elections.

New reporting suggests that may already be happening. According to documents analyzed by Democracy Docket, ICE has investigated hundreds of nonprofits that help Americans register to vote over the past year. Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative arm, focused in particular on dozens of groups in Ohio and Pennsylvania, both battleground states. Those targeted included the Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.

The Washington Post reported this summer that hundreds of immigration agents had been reassigned to hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls. According to an internal agency email reviewed by the Post, ICE officers have been asking detainees since Oct. 1 whether they have ever voted illegally.

This taxpayer-funded effort appears aimed at helping Trump manufacture a pretext to seize power. He has emboldened ICE and supercharged its funding while its operations have terrorized communities across the country.

According to a ProPublica study, at least 506 American citizens have been wrongly swept up in ICE immigration operations since the Trump administration took over. That figure includes at least 70 children and teenagers. At least one American citizen, Brian Morales García, was deported; he was allowed to return from Mexico just one month ago.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly denied arresting American citizens or carrying out indiscriminate stops that amount to racial profiling. The records, as ProPublica’s reporting demonstrates, show otherwise.

But the point is larger than any one wrongful arrest. The Trump administration is using ICE to put its power on display.

That is why DHS has also targeted protesters and people who monitor ICE activity. According to a partially unsealed court filing reviewed by Wired, agents tracked protesters, conducted drive-bys at their homes and even called them on their personal phones. They photographed protesters and observers, ran those images through facial recognition software, gathered information including license plate numbers, and entered it into a database built and hosted by the tech firm Palantir.

The government’s conduct has created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation designed to make people think twice before challenging this administration. It’s all happening at the hands of a secretive, unaccountable federal police force that appears to answer to no one but Trump.

Allison Detzel contributed.

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