The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against six unidentified men, alleging they harassed voters at polling places in suburban Detroit by “registering voters at polling places” and following a woman to her car as she left the polling place. Making comments suggesting that if Kamala Harris wins the election, violence will happen to the voter’s child.

Police were called to many of the polling places in question but did not arrest the people filming, according to affidavits cited in the lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

In one instance, police told a woman who complained that “a group of people were not doing anything illegal and there was nothing the police could do because ‘it’s free speech in a public place,'” according to court documents. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had directed police departments to do otherwise .

The ACLU asked the court to declare it illegal to intimidate voters (including filming voters coming and going to polls) and to stop at polling places.

In response, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Berg issued a temporary restraining order against the unnamed defendants on Tuesday, ordering them to “cease harassment or intimidation of voters at or outside the polls during the November 2024 Election.”

A poll watcher named Steven Raimi, who was not named in the complaint but was named in Berg’s order, said he saw three men with cameras at Derby Middle School in Birmingham filming people entering and exiting the polling place. One of them was wearing a baseball cap with the words “Don’t bother me, I’m a swearer.” “My rights do not end where your feelings begin.”

Raimi told them they were not allowed to film people entering or leaving the polling place, according to the affidavit. Attorney General Dana Nessel said as much in a letter to police departments around the state in October. The men said it was their First Amendment right.

Court documents said people passing out fliers nearby told Raimi that men were blocking a family from leaving a polling place “even though the family asked them not to record it.”

Raimi later said he saw one of the same men and four others at a polling place at the Southeast Oakland Schools Technical Campus in Royal Oak, where they continued filming even though the precinct supervisor told them it wasn’t allowed, the court heard. documents.

One voter said in a separate statement that one of the men wearing a mask stood four or five feet away from the shooting while trying to vote and refused to move away when asked.

A third affidavit said that at a polling place at First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, a group of five men and one woman crowded the entryway so voters “almost had to pass” and used phones attached to selfie sticks to film inside.

Without it, “Plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm by being deprived of their constitutional right to vote for the November 5, 2024 general election,” Bern wrote in issuing the order.