illegal alien undocumented

===

MERRI OK

use this for voting BS save act ~ 2026 midterm SEE BIG LIE

SEE GOP STEAL ELECTION

SEE VOTER SUPPRESS SAVE ACT

PROJECT 2025 HERITAGE

see GREAT REPLACEMENT RACISM BS SOROS OPEN BORDER

SEE TRUMP SINCE GOLDEN ESCALATOR MEX RAPISTS XO EMERGENCY DECL GANG TREN DE AGUA INVASION FASCISM

JDV EAT PETS MIKE JOHNSON

STEPHEN FUCKING MILLER MASS DEPORT ICE NOEM CONC CAMPS BABY JAIL CRUELTY

CARAVAN XENO SCAPEGOAT migrant crime violent bs

SEE FOX BAD TRINITY HYPE FEAR BIG LIE CRM NEWSMAX NY POST alt fact eARHT2

CLETA ELECTION INTEGRITY BS MILITARIZATION EMERGENCY --> FASCISM

BANNON BENNY JGOP TUCKER LOOMER PAXTON ABBOT TEXAS RON JOHNSON ZINKE?

SEE GOVT SHUTDOWN 10 25 iLLEGAL MEDICARE BS BIG BEUT BILL

see racism WHITE GRIEVANCE

MUSK TWIT

see hurric 3 fema BS lies

see boebert save act Xo trump

see voter roll purge

paxton LULAC raid // nat am dapl 1st target

disambig see immigration

target, bogeyman pending (gangs)

telegram rumble soc med

JONES INFOWARS

NICK SHIRLEY yt INFLUENCER

AHA NOTE FASCIST PLAYBOOK Chic Apt raid 10 25

bak 3 26

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// nevada fail

an 10 26

President Donald Trump’s grandiose claims of voter fraud are falling apart under the weight of his own Justice Department’s figures.

The president’s administration is being asked to account for its broad allegations of fraud in California after the DOJ put forward charges on only 34 ballots said to be illegal from the nearly 94 million that have been cast in the state since 2020.

On Monday, federal prosecutors made public a statewide probe into noncitizen voting and out charges against 28 lawful permanent residents. The San Francisco Chronicle reports 23 of them are alleged to have put in 34 ballots between them in elections going back to 2020.

Put another way, that is 0.00004 percent of what was put to the vote in California’s eight statewide contests over the period, hardly the sort of numbers to back up the administration’s claims of rampant illegal voting.

The department has been at odds with the state over this. In July, the Department of Homeland Security released a preliminary review saying it had found over 190,000 possible noncitizens registered to vote in California.

By October, the figure was down to about 20,000, and the Justice Department filed suit when state officials would not comply with federal requests to root out suspected noncitizens and keep their votes off the tally.

And yet the criminal cases unsealed on Monday were limited to fewer than three dozen questionable ballots in the whole state.

The 28 defendants are U.S. residents but not citizens, so they are barred from federal elections; they face charges of false statements on naturalization papers and fraudulent registration.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter says the prosecutions make good on the administration’s demands, pointing to the 28 on the government’s list of suspects. “California refused to look at that list,” he said in a statement from the Justice Department.

Election experts are having none of it. Rick Hasen of UCLA’s election law program sees the case as a “drop in the bucket” compared to the 23 million voters on the California roll.

Hasen also pointed out that some of those charged never actually cast a ballot despite the illegal registration. The figures do nothing to prove every name on the administration’s list is a legitimate voter, but they do illustrate how few cases federal prosecutors have mustered in light of earlier estimates.

McCotter concedes some on the suspect list may in the end be shown to be American citizens, and Gov. Gavin Newsom was quick to deride that as the administration goes after access to registration records.

Federal judges have already turned down the administration’s bid for the full voter rolls on privacy and legal grounds.

For their part, California officials say the records are kept in order and will have none of Trump’s contention that the state’s elections are rife with fraud.

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an 1026

A Republican election official says she is being threatened with investigation and criminal liability after defying the Trump administration's demands, warning that threats to American elections are now coming from inside the federal government.

Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the heavily Republican state, revealed the extraordinary pressure she has faced to give up sensitive voter information during an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes.

Henderson states that election officials are usually threatened with attacks on election integrity coming from non-governmental actors and cyber criminals, but is now receiving pressure from the President Donald Trump administration.

"In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said to correspondent Lesley Stahl before adding, “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government."

She said the Justice Department unlawfully demanded that states surrender their complete voter registration lists, including confidential information which is protected under state law.

Henderson said officials were asked to provide Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver's license numbers. She said federal authorities did not offer any reasonable explanation for their demands or how they planned to use the information. Henderson and 29 other states from both parties refused to give in to the demands.

After the refusal, she received a September letter from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division stating she was under investigation and involved in ongoing litigation over compliance with federal election laws. The department also threatened her with potential criminal or civil liability if she did not preserve the voting records. The dispute came after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking Utah's voter data.

The Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended Henderson after the letter became public.

"It is wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law," Cox wrote at the time.

Trump administration officials have argued the voter records are necessary to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told CBS that there are potentially thousands of cases under investigation.

But Henderson said Utah's own review found just 52 questionable registrations out of more than 2 million voters. The administration has sued states that refused to provide complete voter lists, even as officials say privacy laws protect the data they seek.

This warning comes at a time when a broader federal campaign is underway, including the seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia and legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voting. The California secretary of state has challenged the government's evidence and said it is threatening eligible voters.

Henderson has no plans to back down from the threats and said she will continue to resist the DOJ’s requests.

"I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right," she said, continuing: "I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to."

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MMA

Who's calling for the Trump administration to send federal agents to polling places?

Right-wing media personalities have pushed for the Trump administration to send federal agents and the military to polling places and interfere with vote counting, but voting rights groups are pushing back

Written by Jack Winstanley & Reed McMaster

Published 10/02/26

Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, right-wing media figures have called for President Donald Trump to deploy federal law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, or the military to polling stations across the country to “surround the polls” as votes are cast or to interfere with vote counting after the election.

While administration officials have offered mixed messaging on whether they'd actually send law enforcement agents or military to polling places, the law directly prohibits any potential effort to station armed federal agents at polls, and experts say this policy could potentially disenfranchise voters who feel intimidated by their presence. In order to prevent this kind of interference by federal agents at the polls, civil rights, labor, and voting rights groups have filed lawsuits ahead of the midterms.

The proposal to deploy ICE officers to polling stations is just one of several election-related policies floated by right-wing media and the Trump administration ahead of the 2026 midterms. Right-wing media figures have also suggested the president could declare a national emergency over alleged voter fraud in order to increase federal control over the midterms, and have pushed for restrictive voting requirements such as those included in the SAVE America Act. The courts have blocked many of the administration's actions to implement parts of these policies.

Is it even legal for law enforcement or the military to be at polling places?

As the Brennan Center for Justice's Sean Morales-Doyle has written, “The law is crystal clear: It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place.” Dale Ho, then-director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, similarly stated, “There's no law that I'm aware of that permits, or that would authorize, the president to deploy federal law enforcement or military or anything like that for domestic use in … or around polling places.”

Experts explain that stationing federal law enforcement at polling sites risks intimidating voters out of casting their ballots. The ACLU noted that the mere presence of federal immigration agents at polling places could qualify as illegal voter intimidation, with its report listing “the deployment of federal immigration agents or federalized National Guard in or around polling places in targeted communities during early voting or on Election Day to try to suppress voting” as an example of “illegal voter intimidation.” The ACLU also specifically cites “aggressively questioning voters about their citizenship, criminal record, or other qualifications to vote” as another example of illegal voter intimidation.

Ahead of the midterm elections, several lawsuits have already been filed to block federal agents from interfering at the polls, including one from a coalition of civil rights groups and unions. The Brennan Center also noted that any individual can sue under the Voting Rights Act if they are “intimidated from voting by the presence of ICE agents or soldiers.”

Who has been among the biggest proponents of having federal agents at polling places? Steve Bannon.

For months, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon has been a prominent voice supporting the deployment of federal agents to polling stations, regularly advocating on his show for ICE to be present at polling stations.

Bannon said ICE officers will be near polling places: “If you don't have an ID — if you're not a citizen — you're not voting.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 8/19/25]

While interviewing former Trump Department of Homeland Security adviser Todd Bensman, Bannon stated, “I think ICE agents belong at polling places.”

Bannon dismissed fears of voter intimidation, stating, “It's intimidation. It should be intimidating to noncitizens. Yes, we want it to be intimidating to noncitizens. You should not go to a polling place.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 8/13/26]

Bannon called it a “minimum requirement” for ICE to be present at polling stations. [Real America's Voice, War Room, 7/17/26]

Bannon said that stationing ICE at airports can be “a test case … to really perfect ICE's involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” Bannon added, “They can’t work the machines, you know what they’ll do? Just walk up and down, hey, we're going to speed things through — can we check your IDs? That’s what’s going to happen in the fall of ’26 because, folks, we’re tired of having elections stolen.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 3/23/26]

Bannon stated, “And I'm saying you're going to have ICE agents around the polls to make sure you can't have illegal aliens in there voting.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/19/26]

Bannon also said in February, “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/3/26]

Who else in right-wing media has promoted federal agents at polling places?

Article III Project founder Mike Davis: “I would have ICE agents and other federal law enforcement at every polling place across America. And that should only scare away noncitizens.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 9/1/26]

Podcaster Tim Pool stated that, “at the bare minimum,” he expects federal law enforcement to be present at polling locations in states that do not cooperate with DHS. He said, “This press conference had me expecting, OK, Trump made the announcement. Markwayne Mullin, DHS, they're going to come out and they're going to say, here's what we intend to do. I mean, at the bare minimum, we expect something like we will have federal law enforcement agency at polling locations in states that do not cooperate.” [Rumble, Tim Pool Daily Show, 7/17/26]

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “Making sure illegal immigrants do not show up at polling sites is not a horrible use of ICE.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 3/24/26]

Podcaster Benny Johnson: “Can we deploy ICE to every voting booth in America? Would that fix the fraud? Of course, it would.” Johnson continued, “Why are we even talking about the SAVE Act? You don't need the SAVE Act if you don't have a nation overrun with criminal aliens.” [YouTube, The Benny Show, 3/24/26]

On X22 Report, the host declared that ICE and the National Guard can “absolutely” “assist with helping in the elections.” [Rumble, X22 Report, 3/24/26; X22 Report, accessed 9/24/26]

Fox’s Jesse Watters argued for ICE to be at polling locations. Watters said, “Well, one of the demands, they say no ICE agents can be at a polling station. What's the trouble with that, Jessica? What's the problem? If illegals aren't voting, why can't ICE agents be at a polling station?” [Fox News, The Five, 3/23/26]

X22 Report’s host also argued that “if you pre-position ICE in certain areas around the country, maybe with the National Guard, that makes it a lot more difficult for the illegals to actually vote in the election.” He added that lawsuits preemptively filed over potential ICE deployments to polling locations were an attempt “to find out if ICE is going to be at the voting centers.” [Rumble, X22 Report, 3/3/26]

During an appearance on Newsmax, radio host Tony Katz questioned, “Why aren’t ICE agents at polling places? Why aren't we ensuring that Americans vote?” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 3/3/26]

The Gateway Pundit wrote in a blog that any concern from Democrats about voter intimidation because of ICE presence “only makes sense if illegal aliens are, in fact, showing up to vote.” The blog, which also shares Bannon’s call for ICE to “surround the polls,” states, “Democrats will inevitably argue that ICE’s presence at the polls constitutes voter intimidation, but that concern only makes sense if illegal aliens are, in fact, showing up to vote.” [The Gateway Pundit, 2/4/26]

Newsmax host Carl Higbie said, “ICE at polling places shouldn’t be a problem because illegals shouldn’t be voting in our elections.” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 2/2/26]

Who has suggested deploying the military to interfere with vote counting after the election?

In response to host Alex Jones asking what “martial law after the election” would look like, attorney Peter Ticktin said “it would be the FBI probably going out and seizing the machines where there’s a good reason to suspect that the vote was not a real vote.” He further explained, “Let the machines do the count, but before the count — but then let us commandeer and get the ballots. If we have the ballots, we can count them ourselves. You know, there’s ways we can do it, and it would be done after the election, but before certification.” Earlier in the episode, Ticktin claimed Trump's “going to seize the machines. … If it’s stolen from us because of their machines, we’ll be — then he’s going to have to declare martial law.” [Alex Jones Live, The Alex Jones Show, 9/29/26, 9/29/26]

Mark Cook, described by Colorado Newsline as one “of the most influential election deniers in Colorado,” said during an interview with podcaster David Nino Rodriguez that “if the military shows up to ensure that the people can run their own election unfettered, I’m all for that.” He stated, “What really needs to happen is the people that have been manipulating elections, that have stolen the elections from the people and have blocked the people away from having oversight in their own elections, we need someone to hold them back so citizens can have the oversight necessary to conduct their own elections and ensure and verify the integrity of the vote. So if the military shows up to ensure that the people can run their own election unfettered, I'm all for that. Bring them.” [Rumble, 2/19/26; Colorado Newsline, 6/18/24]

On Brighteon Broadcast News, host Mike Adams argued, “We need the military to count the votes, especially in the blue cities, because you can’t trust Democrats.” While speculating about a potential “armed uprising” from the left, Adams added, “I think Trump actually sort of tactically needs that to happen in order to declare the emergency and deploy the troops before Election Day.” [Natural News, Brighteon Broadcast News, 1/14/26; Media Matters, 4/2/18]

On Health Ranger Report two days later, Adams repeated his call to “have the military count the votes.” He argued, “You have to have a national emergency to where you deploy the military, especially in blue cities,” in order to count the votes. [Natural News, Health Ranger Report, 1/16/26]

What has the Trump administration said about deploying federal law enforcement or the military to the polls?

The Department of Homeland Security has offered mixed messaging on the potential for sending ICE officers to polling locations. In February, DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity Heather Honey — whom ProPublica has described as “a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results” — reportedly told a group of secretaries of state that “any suggestion that ICE will be present at any polling location is simply not true.” But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has refused to rule out the possibility; during his confirmation hearing, Mullin said that if ICE is sent to polling places, “there will be a reason for us to be there, and it’ll be known why we’re there.” Mullin added in September that agents could make arrests at polling places if needed, noting that the “only reason” agents “would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone.”

White House border czar Tom Homan, meanwhile, downplayed concerns about federal law enforcement presence at polling stations, noting, “Part of DHS' job is secure elections, and I’m not going to say … what our plan is going forward, but if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don’t see the issue of what they’re concerned about.” And earlier this year, Trump expressed his own willingness to send federal agents to the polls when a reporter asked whether he would “send the National Guard or ICE to voting locations in November” and Trump responded that he would do “anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”

What do voting rights groups advise voters to do in response to threats of law enforcement or the military at polling places?

Voting rights groups have resources to prepare voters for the possibility of federal agents or the military intimidating voters at polling stations. Democracy Security Project Action Fund suggests voters “go to vote.gov and check your eligibility; be sure that you’re registered” and know “the most convenient polling place for you, whether that’s in person or vote-by-mail. Keep track of deadlines.”

Additional recommendations from the ACLU include:

What to do if there are reports of ICE, National Guard, or other federal agents in your community during early voting or Election Day

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mma

New Reuters study finds that number of noncitizens mistakenly registered to vote in the last 26 years “too small” to impact elections

9 26

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RWW 9 26

Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: Jimmy Kimmel Exposes Trump’s Latest Censorship Attack Over Talarico

The late-night talk show host says the Federal Communications Commission is threatening him over an interview with Texas’s James Talarico.

Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert @ Wired: A US Census Report on Noncitizen Voting Used Bad Data to Reach Faulty Conclusions

Trump has touted a recent Census report. WIRED found grave flaws in its analysis and the process behind it, and confirmed the identity of several of its authors—among them a one-time DOGE affiliate.

RWW -->

A reportpublished by the US Census Bureau last month purported to uncover evidence backing up President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that noncitizens voting cost him the 2020 election. It was the latest salvo in Trump’s broader assault on the safety of US elections. “I WON THE ELECTION,” Trump quickly declared on Truth Social after the publication of the report.

However, though Trump and other government officials quickly shared and praised the report, a WIRED investigation has uncovered significant flaws in the data used to compile the report, as well as in the approval process used prior to publication. WIRED has also learned that a number of the report’s authors have links to the Trump administration and the Republican party. They include one former affiliate of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and two researchers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a highly influential think tank founded by veterans of Trump’s first administration.

The report, titled “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis,” claims that an analysis of over 128 million voter records from the 2020 election identified 24,000 people tied to administrative records indicating noncitizen status. The numbers range from 4,300 in California to fewer than 15 in Wyoming—not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential race. But even these fig

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RWW

David Gilbert @ Wired: Waffle House Teleporter Gregg Phillips Is Still on the Trump Administration’s Payroll

In June, a FEMA official infamous for claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House was reportedly ousted. He’s still employed by the government, though—and meeting with a Trump fixer.

Gregg Phillips, an election denier who once claimed he teleported to a Waffle House, says he is still working in the Trump administration, after he was reportedly removed from his influential role overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency response efforts in June.

While it remains unclear what Phillips has been working on in the administration since stepping away as head of the Office of Response and Recovery, on Sunday he wrote on Truth Social, “I have been in the admin since last year. I’ll be leaving soon to rejoin the fight.”

One day later, he was pictured at a Department of Justice building alongside Ed Martin, the former US pardon attorney who President Donald Trump last week announced would be departing the administration to “fight legal battles for the upcoming midterm election.”

WIRED's Walking Tour of President Trump’s Renovated Washington, DC

“Enjoyed the visit with our friend Ed Martin today in DC,” Phillips wrote on Truth Social. “Haters are gonna hate this.”

Martin and the Department of Justice did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment about Phillips’ role in the administration. Phillips declined to comment.

A FEMA spokesperson directed WIRED to a statement it issued in June saying Phillips was “taking leave for personal reasons.” When asked if Phillips was still employed by the agency and still on leave, the agency didn’t respond.

Phillips is on administrative leave, according to the White House, which also confirmed that Martin is still working in the administration until September 4. Federal employees on administrative leave are entitled to full pay and benefits.

Phillips has long promoted baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, claiming in 2016 that more than 3 million noncitizens voted in the presidential election, robbing Trump of winning the popular vote. Days after taking office in 2017, Trump promoted Phillips’ false claims. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Phillips gained further notoriety when the group he was involved with, True the Vote, provided the data that underpinned the debunked film 2000 Mules, which falsely alleged that a network of individuals was paid to illegally collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes.

A 2022 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that True the Vote has raised millions of dollars from donors by repeatedly promising to uncover evidence of election fraud but has failed to do so. Much of that money, CIR reported, went to companies controlled by Phillips and in loans to True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht.

Phillips was appointed last December to head up FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery despite having no past experience working in emergency response. In June, following his departure, the agency thanked Phillips for his “service, dedication, and leadership,” adding that “he has played a pivotal role in stabilizing the Office of Response and Recovery and advancing key reforms to strengthen our mission delivery.”

Three sources at FEMA, who were granted anonymity due to fears of recrimination by the administration, tell WIRED that Phillips has not been seen at FEMA’s headquarters since June.

When Phillips posted on Truth Social this week about his decision to “rejoin the fight” he was once again discussing “illegals on the voter rolls” and the work he and Engelbrecht had done almost a decade ago to address the perceived issue—which is so rare that even a third-party analysis of a database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation shows it contains fewer than 100 examples. When asked if Phillips’ comment meant he would be working with True the Vote again, Engelbrecht said, “I’m sure Gregg will be involved in a number of projects in the future, and we at TTV think very highly of him, but in an effort to set the record straight, he is not part of the True the Vote team. He previously assisted TTV as a contractor on research projects from 2020–2023.”

When asked about Phillips’ role as a board member of True the Vote, as revealed by the CIR report, Engelbrecht did not respond.

WIRED recently revealed that ahead of the midterms, True the Vote will release another documentary, entitled Trapped, which again makes allegations about widespread and systemic voter fraud.

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MSNBC 8 26 NOT TRYING TO PROVE BIG LIE IN CT, JUST GIN UP A GOOD ENOUGH STORY TO DECLARE EMERGENCY

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an 8 26

With the midterms right around the corner and President Donald Trump relentlessly pressing his conspiracies about voter fraud, an insider and whistleblower from his first term has revealed that his “tin-foil hat” plan to “interfere in the democratic process” is underway. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration and exposed a number of its secrets. On Wednesday, he sounded the alarm that a plot Trump began nearly a decade ago is coming to its most dangerous phase.

Over the course of the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are “no plans” to do so without ruling it out. But “evidently,” writes Taylor, “all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”

Taylor is referencing new bombshell reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday, writes Taylor, “that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.” Despite the fact that they are being intentionally obscure about this, says Taylor, “the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for ‘illegal’ registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.”

It’s all part of a wider effort, asserts Taylor, to convert “the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build ‘approved’ lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.”

All of this began under Trump’s first term, according to Taylor, who writes, “I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.”

He notes that thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president “seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot.” For example, “the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of ‘noncitizen voters.’ But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185, then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.”

According to Taylor, “Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”

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MMA

Claro y Directo America host: “We'll turn our elections into the whores of the entire world. Here, anyone who wants to can vote. Whoever can afford the ticket, come and vote.”

08/13/26

Steve Bannon and former Trump DHS adviser Todd Bensman agree ICE should be present at polling places

08/13/26

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an 8 26

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli promised President Donald Trump that California was “a fraudster’s paradise,” and pledged would announce charges within weeks of his appointment. That was two months ago.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Friday that Essayli talked a big game but has failed to deliver.

After the California primary election, Trump and Republicans sounded the alarm that there had to be fraud going on because it was taking too long to count the ballots in Los Angeles County.

"They are trying to steal the governor of California primary, and the mayor of Los Angeles, primary, away from two great Republican candidates. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail in ballots," Trump ranted in all-caps on Truth Social.

Essayli posted his own promise to Trump on X, saying, "Without commenting on any specific investigation, my office has multiple election fraud investigations underway in coordination with @FBILosAngeles . We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent."

Only a few days later, he was speaking to Glenn Beck, promising to charge individual actors “in the next … one to two months.”

“I hate to put timelines on things,” Essayli said. “We need some of these results to be certified so we can prove some of the allegations. But we will be charging some people.”

He also called on the public to send tips proving voter fraud was "widespread" in California.

“We are looking for any widespread conspiracy, if you will. Right now, I would say our investigations lean more into individual actors,” he explained. “Theoretically, I’d have to charge thousands of people to prove that it changed the outcome of the election. … But we are looking. We are looking.”

When he spoke to Chris Cuomo on News Nation, Essayli said, “there is evidence of voter fraud … and when we’re ready to bring those cases, you’ll see the evidence. You’ll see the case.”

But, that was at the beginning of the summer. On June 14, Essayli promised KCRA news, “So some of them are more developed and they’re ready to charge.”

After nothing for months, it appears the prosecutor is beginning to change the narrative, the report explained. The Chronicle cited Essayli, saying that to get access to the voter rolls, the Justice Department must sue the state of California and it might take a while.

A constitutional law professor explained how situations like this go beyond a debate about whether widespread voter fraud exists.

“At this point, unfortunately, I don’t know why anybody would believe the Department of Justice,” said Justin Levitt, who teaches at the Loyola Law School. “And that is not a thing that I relish saying as somebody who used to work there … It’s also not something that I would have said in the administration of any individual other than President Trump.”

When The Chronicle called the office to ask what the hold-up was, they were told they'd have an update in two weeks.

“It turns out that voter fraud does occasionally happen, but it is incredibly rare, like single-digits-of-balance rare,” Levitt said. “The elections in California, the elections in Southern California, the elections in other parts of California are very clean. And election officials work incredibly hard to make sure that they’re very clean. It does great disservice to the election officials when people run their mouths.”

He explained that Essayli is "a piece" of the larger whole of the Justice Department and currently the DOJ doesn't enjoy much credibility in court.

“I’m not sure this U.S. attorney has established himself as a trusted local partner with the sort of vague allegations of widespread wrongdoing that he hasn’t been able to back up. To be clear, he hasn’t been able to back it up because I don’t personally believe that these things he was saying are true," Levitt said.

Trump and Republican allies spent over a week spreading claims that fraud was afoot in California and calling for action. Levitt explained that these kinds of conspiracy theories from officials spread further mistrust and sow doubt.

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AN 8 26 pp 3

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens.

Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

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