"We Have Not Seen This Since Selma”
More Than 100 FBI Agents Target Ohio Voting Rights Group
More than 100 FBI agents targeted one of Ohio’s largest voter registration organizations Thursday in what civil rights leaders are calling an unprecedented act of voter intimidation.
According to leaders with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), approximately 25 FBI agents arrived at the group’s headquarters while more than 100 additional agents targeted individuals affiliated with the organization at their homes, offices, and even their children’s schools.
Among those targeted were volunteers and organizers connected to the group’s voter registration efforts.
According to former OOC Executive Director and current board member Prentiss Haney, agents demanded to speak with individuals who were not employees of the organization despite lacking warrants or subpoenas.
“We have not seen this sort of intimidation since Selma,” Haney said, visibly shaken after the operation.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is not a fringe organization. Established more than two decades ago, it has become one of the most influential civic engagement groups in Ohio, registering voters and organizing communities that have historically been underrepresented in the political process. It is particularly well known for its efforts to register new Black voters.
The history of voting rights in America is, in many ways, the history of attempts to stop people from voting.
In the Jim Crow South, Black Americans who attempted to register voters faced surveillance, arrests, threats, economic retaliation, and violence.
Civil rights organizations were infiltrated by law enforcement. Activists were monitored, harassed, and prosecuted under dubious legal theories. Local officials routinely used the machinery of government to discourage participation in elections.
The events that unfolded in Ohio this week evoke uncomfortable memories of that era.
The comparison to Selma made by Haney is not merely rhetorical.
Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, law enforcement agencies often worked hand-in-hand with political leaders seeking to preserve existing power structures. State troopers beat peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday.
During Freedom Summer, voting rights organizers were surveilled, jailed, assaulted, and murdered. Churches hosting voter registration drives were burned. Entire communities were terrorized for attempting to participate in democracy.
The lesson of that history is simple: democracy does not die only when ballots are thrown away. It can also be weakened when citizens become afraid to participate.
That concern was front and center Friday as attorneys, clergy members, voting rights advocates, and elected officials gathered to discuss a response.
“Ohio is the pilot,” said Congresswoman Joyce Beatty. “We’re going to call this what it is – voter intimidation. We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced. We will not let any President bully our voters into staying home.”
Federal agents were not raiding a cartel operation. They were not dismantling a terrorist network. They were targeting individuals connected to voter registration efforts in a state that has become increasingly central to the national fight over voting rights.
The operation also comes at a moment when election conspiracies continue to shape American politics.
For years, Donald Trump has falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen despite dozens of court rulings, audits, recounts, and investigations reaching the opposite conclusion. In recent days, Trump has similarly made false claims regarding the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral election.
The danger of those narratives is not merely that they are false. It is that they create a political environment in which voting itself becomes suspect and organizations dedicated to increasing participation become targets.
History shows where that road can lead.
From Reconstruction to Jim Crow. From literacy tests to poll taxes. From COINTELPRO’s surveillance of civil rights leaders to modern efforts to criminalize voter registration mistakes, the methods change but the underlying objective remains familiar: reduce participation among communities viewed as politically threatening.
That is why so many voting rights advocates view what happened in Ohio as bigger than Ohio.
If the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency can deploy more than a hundred agents against one of the state’s leading voter registration organizations, every volunteer, every organizer, and every citizen who believes in democratic participation is going to take notice.
The question is whether they become intimidated by it.
Rev. Michael Harrison of Union Baptist Church in Youngstown says he will not.
“I have no intention of stopping,” Harrison said. “And I’m going to get the biggest coalition of people I can get my hands on so that we can make sure that fairness and opportunity takes place for us all.”
When voting rights organizers see Selma in the actions of federal officials, the country should pay attention and act.
As Beatty told the crowd Friday, “We will fight like our life depends on it, because it does.”
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