President Trump’s Department of Justice plans to deploy election monitors to at least two cities in Massachusetts and two in New Hampshire for their respective state primaries.

The Massachusetts primary is set for Sept. 1, and New Hampshire’s is scheduled for Sept. 8. Election monitors — who are usually Department of Justice attorneys — will be sent to Boston and New Bedford, according to federal and state officials. Manchester and Nashua are the two New Hampshire cities.

Harmeet Dhillon, who serves as the department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, characterized the effort as a way to boost voter confidence in election outcomes.

“This is something that DOJ does routinely,” she said in a video posted to the social media platform X this week.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office, which oversees Massachusetts elections, said the Department of Justice has deployed election monitors in the past, including in Boston in 2024, and going back to at least President George W. Bush’s administration. Galvin’s office has previously cooperated and maintained cordial working relationships with federal elections officials, said spokeswoman Debra O’Malley.

But there is a different, more combative tone from the Trump administration this year, O’Malley added, particularly with announcements coming through social media posts, and formal notices coming days later, leading to confusion among elections officials. For example, on top of Dhillon’s social media post about election monitors, she also sent a letter to all 50 states this week threatening prosecution of elections officials for knowingly allowing noncitizens to vote.

There’s no record of any elections official in recent American history engaging in such a scheme, and no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.

Galvin said he took the letter as a threat.

“It’s clearly part of the continuing pattern by the Trump administration to exert control over local elections as we’re heading into this national midterm,” he said.

Galvin said federal officials should look to collaborate with state elections officers, not admonish them.

The Justice Department also requested information from Boston and New Bedford, including lists of registered voters for the 2026 election and polling locations.

“It certainly seems to be a more antagonistic approach than both Democratic and Republican” justice departments in the past, O’Malley told WBUR.

Department of Justice monitors, who typically seek to ensure compliance with federal voting laws such as the Voting Rights Act, have the same rights as anybody else wishing to observe elections, but they cannot interact with voters and they can’t intimidate voters, according to O’Malley.

“They can stand there silently and watch, like everybody else,” she said.

Boston’s elections department was put under state receivership after the city saw ballot shortages in the 2024 election — blamed on human error — and local elections officials didn’t pick up the phone to answer questions from their state-level counterparts.

According to O’Malley, the Trump administration is sending election monitors to the city, citing requirements under the Voting Rights Act to provide bilingual ballots and signage as well as access to interpreters due to its population of Spanish-speaking voting-age citizens.

New Bedford does not have the same language requirements because its voting-age Hispanic citizen population is under the threshold at 4.5%, but DOJ officials said they still plan to send election monitors there.

Carol Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, acknowledged in a statement that election monitors have an important role to play.

But, she added, “The Trump administration has been stoking baseless fears about the security of our elections, spreading lies about voter fraud, and seeking to intimidate state and local election officials. Let’s be clear: There is absolutely no evidence of widespread voter fraud, either here in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the country.”

The other states expected to see election monitors for their primaries include Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia, according to Dhillon’s announcement.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. But in her social media post earlier this week, Dhillon indicated there was more to come on the monitoring front.

“Stay tuned as we get towards the general election where there’ll be an even more expanded program for vote monitors,” she said, “as DOJ has done for decades in our great nation.”

With additional reporting by WBUR’s Rob Lane.