About a month after alleging Nevada had as many as 16,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials admitted they had confirmed that only 185 were actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian. In a primetime TV address on 16 July, Donald Trump claimed that a DHS review had found about 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states. In follow-up letters to those states – Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey – DHS softened that claim, saying it represented a ceiling of potential non-citizens registered.
Experts expressed skepticism over the claim, predicting that the ultimate number of confirmed non-citizens would drop dramatically and noting that DHS had not revealed its methodology, nor provided a list of voters to the states. In its letter to Nevada, DHS suggested there may be as many as 15,903 non-citizens registered in the state. DHS officials met with Nevada election officials last week for the first time to discuss the claim, and said they were still reviewing the data and that 15,903 represented the ceiling of how many non-citizens could be registered.
We still have 14,000+ that still need additional review,” Kimberley Vogt, a DHS official, wrote to Nevada election officials on Thursday. The department also sent the state an additional 6,218 people whose information it had not yet manually reviewed, but for whom it had made a “higher confidence match” that they could be non-citizens. A DHS spokesperson said in a statement it was “false” and the department had only confirmed 185 people on the list were non-citizens.
The list shared with Nevada also included 6218 other individuals with the highest number of matching attributes. This was at the request of NV. They wanted to start with a subset less than the 15,903,” the spokesperson said.
In a 14 August meeting with DHS officials, Nevada elections director Mark Wlaschin and other staffers in the secretary of state’s office pressed the federal government to explain how it had gone about flagging non-citizens. DHS officials said they compared Nevada’s public voter rolls from July 2025 to internal immigration data from US Customs and Immigration Services. On the call was Heather Honey, a prominent election denier known for misleading research into voter records, who now works at DHS.
At one point, C Murphy Hebert, Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state, asked officials to clarify whether the 15,000 number was a ceiling on the number of potential non-citizens. It’s the number that you are starting with,” Hebert said. She acknowledged the 15,000 number was “preliminary” and there hadn’t been a “full manual review” of each one.
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