USPS Hires Shady Armed Security Service Weeks Before Midterms

Nearly 1,000 armed guards have descended on the United States Postal Service, deploying to at least 55 facilities across the country ahead of Election Day.

The security officers were contracted through multinational private security company Prosegur, according to a Raw Story investigation.

Prosegur has a history of alleged human rights violations, including an incident as recent as 2024 in which the company’s Brazilian subsidiary reportedly prevented indigenous people from accessing food and medical care at a nearby town, per an assessment by the Ethics Council of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund.

Prosegur’s guards are currently located at USPS facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego, and Tampa, according to internal memos obtained by Raw Story.

One postal contractor that spoke with the digital outlet said she was “alarmed” that the armed security guards were predominantly confined to “deep blue states or swing states.”

Frank Albergo, the executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association union, said that the armed guards were deployed at facilities with more than 1,000 employees.

“No one from the postal service will be supervising these armed guards. It will be completely a private contractor who controls these armed guards, so you basically have private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control. To me, that’s crazy,” Albergo told Raw Story.

“It just could be a red flag. Will it have an impact on the election? Who knows? But you certainly could argue that it has an effect,” Albergo continued. “It might give Trump an excuse to call into question the integrity of the election. That’s the problem. It’s the perception of it.”

Mark Ungar, a political science professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York who has researched private security firms such as Prosegur, suggested to Raw Story that the company’s presence could afford the Trump administration a retroactive alibi.

“The Trump administration is clearly taking every step they can to control voting, and they’re going to use the Postal Service to do that,” Ungar said. “Any contract with Prosegur, any way that removes accountability from the American people of the Postal Service, which they’re already doing, I think, is concerning at the very least.”

In a statement to Raw Story, a spokesperson for USPS’s law enforcement branch, the United States Postal Inspection Service, said that the snail mail carrier had introduced armed guards to “provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream or potentially harm the people inside.”

Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent mail-in voting—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite zero evidence and his own apparent preference to vote by mail.

The Supreme Court buoyed one of Trump’s more aggressive voter suppression efforts in August, permitting the White House to move forward with new mail-in voting requirements and an executive order that transferred control of the mail-in voting process to “Trump lackey” (according to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold) Postmaster General David Steiner.

The judiciary decided the following month, however, that the new requirements would not affect the 2026 midterm cycle, effectively thwarting Trump’s eleventh-hour attempt to create a conservative edge in the race to control Washington.

Yet Steiner has already attempted to flex the power of his position. On Wednesday, Steiner informed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that, under a new rule, the USPS would not offer ballot services to states that refused to hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, the president promoted mail-in voting to his supporters on Monday, urging them to cast their ballot however possible, briefly reversing course on his performative opposition to mail-in voting in the face of what looks like it will be a blue tsunami next month.

President Trump is still using your money to pay for his propaganda hype video commercials ahead of the midterms.

On Wednesday morning, another “Final Battle” commercial for the president aired on Fox & Friends, featuring a black and white clip of Trump walking while he references a “final battle.” It’s the same one that aired on September 27.

“This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and fascists,” he says in the ad. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“Paid for by the U.S. Government” flashes at the bottom of the screen as the commercial concludes. The advertisement is virtually identical to a 2024 Trump campaign ad.

Trump announced Monday that his super PAC would pay for future ads, but it appears that’s not the case.

This commercial is the second installment of Trump’s effort to sway voters his way ahead of midterms. The administration is spending $20 million from the Department of Homeland Security budget to pay for them, claiming they’re necessary public service announcements. The first was that strange “Love Me” ad, which debuted late September on Fox News during Jesse Watters Primetime.

And these commercials aren’t convincing anyone. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 86 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s use of taxpayer funds on the commercials. Even Republican Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds were critical, while Vice President JD Vance insisted that the ads were somehow “not partisan” and that they were “trying to tell a story.”

Whatever story that is doesn’t seem to matter ahead of midterms, as Americans struggling with rising prices need more than cool videos to assuage them.

The Department of Homeland Security radically reduced training requirements for local law enforcement officers whose departments had agreed to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In an email obtained by American Oversight, an ICE official whose name was redacted explained that the training had been reduced from four weeks of in-person instruction to just 40 hours of virtual courses, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Additionally, training on real-world scenarios that officers might encounter in the field was eliminated entirely.

The email addressed to former ICE Director Todd Lyons and adviser David Venturella explained how the training had been “truncated” to meet demands that the course be shortened. Lyons resigned in May, and Venturella now leads the agency.

Since President Donald Trump reentered office, the number of local police departments collaborating with ICE has increased exponentially. Under the Biden administration, there were 135 active 287(g) agreements across 16 states. Now, more than 2,600 agencies are receiving compensation to assist in Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts, according to the Post. White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demanded last year that ICE arrest 3,000 immigrants a day.

Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, told the Post that some of the materials cut from the training would have helped officers understand whether they had a lawful basis to arrest someone in the first place.

“So for example, who is actually a citizen, what is their immigration status, what grounds could possibly justify seeking their removal?” Chukwu said.

The dangerous consequences of these changes seem obvious: less training will only sow more confusion and chaos during arrests, which will inevitably lead to violent encounters between civilians and law enforcement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigated hundreds of voter registration groups over the past year as part of their efforts to catch noncitizens voting.

The nonprofit organization Democracy Forward obtained government documents showing a wide-ranging probe into the nonprofit groups. The documents also revealed deliberations within Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts investigations for ICE, to send undercover agents into the organizations.

“Future [undercover]-related operations may involve utilizing [undercover agents] to target identified organizations and engage in communications with these entities to substantiate recruitment methods and activities related to illegal alien voter registration,” stated one of the documents. These efforts “will support broader investigative and enforcement actions, leveraging [undercover] findings to initiate prosecutions and dismantle illicit facilitation networks.”

HSI focused on groups in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, although it also looked into organizations in Minnesota, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey as well. There is no proof that HSI ever went ahead with using undercover agents, according to Democracy Docket.

The investigations involved using nonprofit search engines and other databases attempting to find “derogatory information” about them. HSI looked into at least 82 organizations in Pennsylvania, including the state’s branch of Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest civil rights and advocacy organization for American Muslims.

The efforts went beyond nonprofits, as HSI investigated state primary elections earlier this year, the documents revealed, trying to find “any notable trends or vulnerabilities in upholding election integrity.”

HSI’s efforts in Pennsylvania also included investigating Zumiez, a clothing brand that has worked with organizations like Voto Latino and Rock the Vote that encourage civic engagement among young people. Why Zumiez received scrutiny is unclear, as it is a national corporation with headquarters in Washington state.

All of the administration’s efforts seem to be an attempt to prove a long-standing conservative conspiracy theory that Democrats register noncitizens to vote to win elections. Despite the right’s repeated claims of rigged elections, the few actual cases of voter fraud appear to catch conservatives more than anyone else.

Donald Trump is dragging his feet in dealing with the recent pneumonic plague case in Russia.

Speaking with reporters on the White House South Lawn Tuesday evening, the president appeared completely disaffected and uninterested in the matter, offering short replies about his approach to the worrisome outbreak.

However, in doing so, Trump also revealed that he hasn’t yet spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Have you spoken to President Putin about the plague in Russia?” one reporter asked.

“I have a call scheduled, yup,” Trump said.

“When is that call scheduled for?” the reporter followed up.

“Very soon,” Trump added.

When asked by another reporter if American intelligence agencies had more intel on the suspicious death, Trump relented that he was in “deep discussions” with U.S. officials and could speak about it “probably tomorrow.”

But Trump did not answer any other questions on the matter, including an attempt to specify if the timeframe for speaking with Putin was contained to sometime this week.

Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia, died of severe pneumonia on the night between October 1 and October 2. Russian health officials have not yet confirmed that her death was the result of pneumonic plague, or explained how she got ill, but her death sparked enough regional concern to place 200 people who had been in contact with Shipilova into quarantine.

Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health watchdog, announced Wednesday that 90 percent of the people placed into quarantine had been released after thousands of lab tests came back negative for dangerous pathogens, according to Reuters.

The agency rejected assertions that the lab worker fell ill from exposure at her workplace, noting in a statement that Shipilova was vaccinated and therefore “immune to the dangerous infections with which she worked.”