DHS voter probe likely breaks state laws, whistleblower alleges

A whistleblower alleges that a Trump administration initiative to find noncitizen voters requires federal employees to misrepresent themselves on state voter lookup tools, likely breaking state laws. The nearly 30-page disclosure, released Monday, warns the effort could wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official federal records.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate minority leader, and Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections, published the anonymous statement. The Department of Homeland Security program, known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” asks U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers to run DHS-provided lists of individuals through state voter registration systems to find “unlawful voters,” according to the account.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees were pulled from their regular duties in late August and completed a less than two-hour training session before beginning the searches, the whistleblower said.

The account includes screenshots and transcripts of that training. Agents have been asked to review 40 individuals per day, giving them about 12 minutes to determine whether each person is a legal voter and create federal records of anyone who is not, according to the whistleblower.

Schumer and Padilla said Monday the initiative is an example of President Donald Trump attempting to interfere in elections, and they warned the short timelines would impede proper investigations. They noted DHS data on voters can be unreliable and differ from state records, making federal findings based on that data potentially problematic.

“We just got more proof of Trump’s vile schemes to rig our elections,” Schumer told reporters. “The lengths Trump will go to cheat, lie and steal in this upcoming election are simply beyond the pale.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The disclosure describes the federal government working around a lack of state data by directing Citizenship and Immigration Services employees to pose as individual voters to access their state voter records. Some states, such as Virginia, explicitly limit their voter lookup tools to individuals who attest under penalty of law that they are looking up their own records, the report said. In other states, like California, personally identifiable information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number is needed to look up individual voter records.

The whistleblower said that when officers raised concerns about liability for searching the tools against state guidance, agency leaders told them to proceed anyway.

Schumer and Padilla on Sunday sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting more information about the initiative and demanding that it be stopped.

Asked about the whistleblower report, a DHS spokesperson said the department is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.”

“The department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

In response to complaints about the timing, limited training and quotas for agents, the spokesperson said “far from being rushed or untrained, these investigative efforts are conducted diligently and professionally.”

The New York Times first reported on the DHS initiative in early September. The whistleblower account released Monday was produced by the watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund, which said it represents the whistleblower as a client. The group said the person is anonymous because of “an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”