Homeland Security investigators have drawn on tens of millions of records in a nationwide search for noncitizens who register or vote illegally. They also looked at dozens of nonprofit voter-registration groups. They considered using undercover agents, according to internal documents made public this week.
The 166 pages of records were released on Wednesday by the advocacy group Democracy Forward
, which obtained them through a records request. CNN and States Newsroom reported on their contents. The documents are mostly status reports from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most details are redacted, and the reports date from May and June, so they may not show the current state of the work.
What the documents show
According to CNN,
a June 1 HSI report said investigators had ingested 50.6 million records from a Justice Department dataset
. They also had another 48.4 million records obtained by Heather Honey, a senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, through what the report called “independent sources.” The documents do not name those sources. They also do not make clear whether the two datasets overlap, so the figures do not necessarily represent that many different people.
CNN noted that the data may include public voter lists from California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada that DHS bought and analyzed around that time. In July, Mullin announced that his department had found roughly 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in those four states. Officials in those states have repeatedly challenged the claim, CNN reported.
The June report named five states as investigative priorities: New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Ohio. It said 82 nongovernmental organizations had been reviewed in Pennsylvania alone, according to States Newsroom.
The same report raised the possibility of undercover work. States Newsroom quoted it as describing an objective to determine opportunities to use undercover agents in the field. CNN said such agents could gather evidence and trace financial backing if investigators concluded a group was actively recruiting noncitizens to register. New Jersey and Pennsylvania were singled out.
Few findings, according to one account
The newsletter Popular Information, reading the same documents, reported that HSI investigated more than 150 organizations. For the vast majority it found “no derogatory information.” It said 26 were still under review and two were flagged for further investigation in Pennsylvania. The newsletter also said it is unclear whether undercover agents were ever deployed. CNN’s account likewise describes the idea as something officials considered.
One group named in the records, the teachers’ union Education Minnesota, was among 22 organizations HSI was beginning to research in June. Its president, Monica Byron, said the union learned of the investigation only on Tuesday, through Democracy Forward.
Two readings
Democracy Forward says the records show an effort to pursue unfounded fraud claims and increase federal control over elections. Its president, Skye Perryman, said in a statement that the president and his allies “want to pick their voters.” Hart Wood, a senior oversight counsel at the group, called the findings “chilling.”
DHS did not answer specific questions from States Newsroom. In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson said the department had been “incredibly transparent” about acquiring and analyzing publicly available voter files. The spokesperson said DHS and the Justice Department are focused on prosecuting and removing noncitizens who vote and on protecting the value of citizens’ votes. In a separate unsigned statement, DHS said HSI investigates allegations of unlawful registration or voting by noncitizens in federal elections. It said it does not comment on active investigations or methods.
The evidence on noncitizen voting
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that noncitizen voting is a serious problem. Democracy Now, summarizing the CNN report, said such voting occurs too rarely to affect election outcomes. It cited a Reuters review that found just 129 federal prosecutions under the 1996 “voting by aliens” statute. That figure counts prosecutions, not a measure of how many noncitizens may have voted, and supporters of the administration’s approach may argue that the low number reflects limited enforcement rather than limited misconduct.
The release comes with the midterms about four weeks away. Democracy Now also reported that ICE leaders have told agents to raise the pace of immigration arrests ahead of the elections. That is a separate matter from the voter-fraud inquiry, and the documents do not link the two.
The records are a snapshot of a few months of internal reporting. They do not show how many people, if any, have been charged as a result of the data review, and the redactions leave open how the datasets were used.