Trump 'Laying the Groundwork for Election Meddling' With DHS Hunt for Noncitizen Voters

The New York Times' Wednesday reporting on a US Department of Homeland Security "blitz to find elusive voter fraud" by noncitizens is heightening fears that President Donald Trump will try to meddle in the country's midterm elections, which are just over two months away.

The newspaper revealed that as part of a "hunt for noncitizens among the nation's registered voters" internally called the Unlawful Voter Initiative, hundreds of DHS agents "are scouring voter rolls managed by the states, and are using personally identifiable information about individual voters, such as their dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to look them up on those rolls."

"In some cases, investigators are effectively posing as individual voters by plugging their names and personal information into public-facing websites run by the top election official in each state. Some of these sites declare they are meant for individual use, potentially raising privacy concerns," according to the Times, which reviewed related documents and training videos.

While DHS said in a statement that it "is committed to ensuring that only US citizens vote in US elections," and Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin "have made the integrity and security of our elections a top priority," the newspaper noted the "absence of evidence of widespread fraud," and that the department "is pulling agents from their normal duties, which include investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism."

Trump infamously refused to accept his 2020 loss, launching various unsuccessful legal battles and even motivating some of his supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Since returning to power last year, the president has imposed a mass detention and deportation campaign that has killed both immigrants and US citizens while pushing various policies that critics warn are intended to limit legitimate participation in elections, from photo identification requirements to restrictions on voting by mail.

Sharing the reporting on social media Wednesday, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: "In other words, hundreds of federal agents are being diverted away from their jobs going after serious criminals and instead told to find needles in a haystack—all to find evidence for Trump's predetermined conclusions. It's a great time to be a criminal in Trump's America."

Democrats on the US House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee similarly declared that "instead of hunting terrorists and human traffickers, DHS is pulling agents away to investigate a conspiracy theory that has been debunked year after year."

A member of the panel, Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), also stressed that "Trump is pulling DHS agents from human trafficking and terrorism cases to chase his made-up voter fraud conspiracies."

"Even the conservative Heritage Foundation's data shows noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare," he highlighted, referring to the right-wing think tank's database that identifies around 100 cases of noncitizen voting since 2000.

Walkinshaw warned that "Trump is laying the groundwork for election meddling in November."

Daniel Delgado, who served as deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy at DHS during the Biden administration, emphasized that "every agent that's being forced into this witch hunt means one less agent working on critical missions like curbing the flow of fentanyl into the country, or stopping human trafficking and combating terrorism, etc. The administration is deliberately making America less safe."

Cynthia Travieso, executive vice president of state campaigns and programs at the nonprofit All Voting Is Local, ripped the "McCarthy-era-like hunt" as "a waste of resources and a desperate and pathetic attempt to control elections by scapegoating immigrants and spreading lies which can keep specific groups from voting, including Black, Brown, and new Americans."

Travieso continued:

This move by DHS to pull agents that investigate "such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism" is based on false claims and debunked conspiracy theories that put thousands of American voters at risk of losing their voter eligibility. Equally outrageous is that the effort also risks potential privacy breaches due to the unclear use of driver's license data, birth dates, and Social Security numbers. It's especially ironic that President Trump’s DHS is expanding its immigrant voter hunt at the same time as the US Postal Service's purported effort to sabotage vote-by-mail, which would harm naturalized citizens who vote by mail at a rate of nearly 8 percentage points higher than native-born citizens. This is part of the blueprint that demonstrates how badly the White House administration wants to control our elections.

States run elections, not the president and not DHS. State election officials have checks and balances in place to verify an individual's voter eligibility and keep voter rolls accurate, and they work incredibly hard to ensure that every eligible voter can vote and that every vote is counted.

Instead of fueling election conspiracy lies, the Trump administration should focus on protecting voters from barriers to the ballot. Any efforts otherwise are a desperate attempt to undermine the will of the people and sow confusion and distrust. We won't let them gaslight us.

Separately on Wednesday, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) filed a lawsuit against DHS, Mullin, and US Attorney General Todd Blanche, accusing them of illegally targeting citizens who were not born in the United States to prevent them from lawfully voting.

"Naturalized citizens are Americans," CHIRLA executive director Angelica Salas said at a news conference in Los Angeles, according to Spectrum News. "They took the oath. They earned their citizenship, and they have the same rights as every other American citizen."