The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving several federal agents onto a project to scour voter rolls across the United States for immigrants who are ineligible to vote, ahead of the midterm elections, it was reported Wednesday. According to internal documents and testimony of DHS staff reviewed by The New York Times, the plan is to compare state-level voter rolls with federal databases to look for potential voter fraud. It was not immediately clear what officials would do with the findings, but one former official told the Times it was a clear effort to "intimidate people from exercising their right to vote." Part of the project includes agents running other people's names through state-based election websites to check on personal details.
"If the reporting is correct, this is shocking, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see states running to the local courthouses to try and stop this," Charles H Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, told Newsweek. "This is evidence that the federal government isn’t using highly sophisticated techniques in its investigations." President Donald Trump and others within his administration have made repeated claims that there have been high numbers of immigrants—both legal and illegal—voting in federal elections, despite a large body of evidence that such cases are rare and of little impact. While the government has said focusing on the issue is necessary to ensure fair and secure elections, critics argue that pulling agents into such efforts diverts attention away from serious criminal investigations.
"Pulling federal agents off of ongoing investigations into human trafficking and terrorism for a fishing expedition for voter fraud is a galling misuse of government resources," Tim Harper, project lead for elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Newsweek. "The surge announced by DHS is the latest step in the administration's years-long campaign to manufacture a crisis of noncitizen voting, a phenomenon that investigation after investigation has shown to be vanishingly rare. Using the machinery of federal law enforcement to chase a fictional threat while creating a very real one is an unacceptable tradeoff." Newsweek reached out to DHS for comment Wednesday afternoon.
The debate over noncitizen voting has often centered on two competing realities: documented cases do exist, but many studies have found them to be rare relative to the overall number of votes cast. The Brennan Center for Justice, which has studied election fraud claims for years, has described noncitizen voting as "vanishingly rare." In 2024, the organization cited research showing election officials overseeing 23.5 million votes in 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 election referred only an estimated 30 suspected cases of noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. The conservative Heritage Foundation has compiled databases of election fraud, with just 23 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2022.
The Trump administration argues those figures understate the scale of the problem. Federal officials have expanded the use of government databases to review voter rolls and verify citizenship status. According to The , at least 67 million voter registrations have been processed through a strengthened verification system, with tens of thousands of records flagged for further review.
Civil rights groups, however, have warned that naturalized U.S. citizens can be mistakenly identified as noncitizens because of outdated records or database mismatches. Recent investigative reporting has found that despite significant federal efforts, relatively few criminal cases have emerged. ProPublica reported that the administration's nationwide campaign had produced only a few dozen noncitizen-voting prosecutions and even fewer convictions, despite pressure to uncover evidence supporting Trump's long-standing claims about election integrity.
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