Senate Republican alarmed by Steve Bannon's 'chilling' new attack

At least one prominent Republican lawmaker is upset over longtime Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon's demands to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to guard polling places.

Bannon caused a stir when he claimed on his show, "we're going to have ICE around the polls come November." While Bannon is no longer part of the Trump administration, he often has a window into the thinking of Trump's inner circle. The remark was quickly dismissed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who claimed it was just a "silly hypothetical" when reporters brought it up.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), however, didn't find it very silly.

“I think there's an estimated 60 million Hispanics legally present in this country," Tillis told HuffPost's Igor Bobic on Thursday. "We have seen some apprehensions of legally present people ... I think it can have a chilling effect on even U.S. citizens going to the polls because they don't want to be detained and have to prove citizenship.”

In recent months, numerous stories have come out of ICE or Border Patrol agents snatching U.S. citizens off the street, sometimes completely ignoring or disregarding their government IDs, making them submit to facial scans, and holding them for hours with no evidence before letting them go.

Tillis, who is retiring from Congress at the start of next year, has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the Trump administration's more controversial policies. He has even gone so far as to place blocks on confirming Trump nominees in protest of ICE shootings, as well as Trump's war on Federal Reserve independence.