The Trump administration has spent the summer saying huge numbers of noncitizens are on America's voter rolls. In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that his department had found "over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in just 4 U.S. states."

Then, in late August, his department pulled hundreds of immigration officers off their regular work and put them on a new job: finding "unlawful voters." The department called it the Unlawful Voter Initiative.

On Monday, September 14, Sens. Alex Padilla and Chuck Schumer made public a whistleblower's account of how that job is actually being done. It says officers were told to type strangers' personal information into state voter websites built for voters to look up their own records. It says they were given 12 minutes per person. And it says the government's own training admitted that American citizens are in the pile of people being checked.

Who was pulled in, and how fast

The whistleblower works in the fraud and national security unit of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles green cards and citizenship. The officers there normally investigate immigration fraud and national security threats. The New York Times first reported the voter hunt earlier this month, NPR noted.

According to the disclosure, filed with Padilla on September 8 by the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund, the timeline went like this:

• Friday, August 21: officers were told to "stop everything" and watch a training video. It ran 1 hour and 45 minutes. It was the only formal training they got.
• Tuesday, August 25: they were considered ready and started reviewing cases.
• The scope: all 50 states, "targeted at up to hundreds of thousands of individuals."
• The pace: a quota of at least five people an hour and 40 a day, with headquarters tracking each officer's output. That is about 12 minutes to decide whether someone is a citizen, whether they voted illegally, and whether to open a federal law enforcement record on them.
• The deadline: headquarters wanted this stage finished by September 12.

This did not come out of nowhere. In a call with Nevada election officials in August, an associate director at the immigration agency said he'd been discussing "moving 40 additional staff to do nothing but this." By the time the senators wrote, hundreds of employees had been diverted.

Posing as the voter

The officers were given an internal website with a link to every state's voter lookup page — the page where you type your own name and birthday to check your registration.

Some of those pages make you swear the record is yours. Virginia's requires this attestation, which the disclosure reprints in full:

"I certify and affirm that the information provided to access my voter registration is my own or I am expressly authorized by the voter to access this information. I understand that it is unlawful to access the record of any other voter, punishable as computer fraud under Va. Code § 18.2-152.3."

The department's own internal site flagged Virginia, Florida and Massachusetts with the word "(Attestation)." California's lookup asks for a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Officers were using personal details pulled from government files to get past those screens.

When officers asked for the legal basis, the whistleblower says, headquarters gave two answers. One was that lawyers had approved it as "open-source research." The other was that officers were "not personally liable" for the searches. The whistleblower reads that second answer as a sign that leadership knew the searches could be illegal. The disclosure adds that, given the pressure and instructions, "it is likely the case that no officer who has sought to access information on a state website has been truthful about his or her identity."

"Supplemental magic"

The list of names came from the Homeland Security Department, and officers were told to treat it as accurate even when it didn't match what the states showed.

The training video itself admitted the data was patchy. Some states send full birthdates; some send only a birth year. Some people in the files have more than one immigration ID number, and some have more than one Social Security number that "might not both relate to the same person." When one trainer explained where the missing immigration ID numbers would come from, the answer, from the video's transcript, was that they would be "brought in through supplemental magic."

"Magic is not a recognized form of record keeping under state or federal law," the whistleblower's lawyers wrote.

Officers asked if they could skip opening a law enforcement record when the only evidence was the department's own unverified data. They were told no. In California, where the state's lookup site often wouldn't load and there was no other source, the whistleblower says it appears more California residents than not in the data have had records opened against them.

Those records don't stay in the voting world. The senators' summary notes they are used by officers at airports and border crossings and can mean being pulled aside for extra screening. People flagged as "unlawful voters" are likely to be sent to Homeland Security's criminal investigators. And the people on the list don't know they're on it and have no way to fix a mistake.

Citizens, on the list by design

About 36 minutes into the training video, a trainer said it out loud:

"So first, there will be U.S. citizens in this population. So we've done the best we can."

The disclosure explains how. The department took public voter files and matched them against everyone who has ever had an immigration file — including people who have long since become citizens. Officers then use a naturalized citizen's personal details to look for any sign they registered or voted before they were sworn in. Under the process, it makes no difference if the person became a citizen decades ago, or has died.

And if the department's data shows a registration date earlier than the person's naturalization date, the officer has to open the record — even if the officer thinks the data is wrong. The whistleblower says records have already been opened against U.S. citizens.

This is the same kind of data that has already gone wrong in court. In June, a federal judge shut down the administration's overhaul of the SAVE citizenship database after finding it was flagging real citizens as noncitizens and getting them dropped from voter rolls.

What Homeland Security says

The department confirmed it is checking state voter rolls against its immigration files. "It's not rocket science; it's an easy step to secure our elections," a spokesperson told NPR.

On the quotas and the training, the spokesperson said: "Far from being rushed or untrained, these investigative efforts are conducted diligently and professionally." And: "There is no quota on criminality."

The disclosure describes a quota of five people an hour and 40 a day, tracked by headquarters.

On the same day the senators released the complaint, Mullin announced that two noncitizens from Kansas and Louisiana had illegally voted in federal elections. "Every time a non-citizen casts a ballot, it steals a vote from an American citizen," he said.

The numbers this is built on

The last time this department put a number on the problem, it didn't hold up.

Mullin's July announcement claimed 15,903 potential noncitizens on Nevada's rolls. When Nevada election officials got on a call with the department in August, a federal official called that figure "the ceiling." A day later, the department gave Nevada a list of 185 voter ID numbers it said it was confident were noncitizens — and declined to share the details it used to match them. "We are unable to conduct an analysis without real verifiable information," Nevada's deputy secretary of state for elections wrote back.

That fits everything else we know. The conservative Heritage Foundation can find only about 100 proven cases of noncitizen voting since 2000. The Census Bureau's own recent report, with no named authors and no margin of error, put it at less than 0.019% of the 2020 voters it checked. In Texas, Ken Paxton spent more than a year hunting noncitizen voters and prosecuted three.

It also comes after the administration kept losing the front-door route. The Justice Department sued 30 states and D.C. to get their voter files, and judges appointed by both parties have handed it a steady stream of losses. The whistleblower's lawyers call the new effort "an illegal alternative" to those failed lawsuits. And Mullin has already threatened election officials with prison if their states don't cooperate.

What the senators want to know

Padilla and Schumer asked Mullin and immigration agency director Joseph Edlow to stop the searches immediately and report to Congress. Among their questions: whether any of these findings have gone to state or local election offices to decide who is eligible to vote — before or after the November 3 election — and what a wrongly flagged citizen can do about it.

"If unreliable DHS data is used to generate purported evidence of 'unlawful voters,' that could disenfranchise eligible voters or disrupt state and local election administration," they wrote.

What the disclosure shows

According to a whistleblower, starting August 25 Trump's Homeland Security Department had immigration officers comb voter records in all 50 states for up to hundreds of thousands of people, at a quota of 40 people a day, after a single training video. The whistleblower says those officers were told to use other people's personal details on state lookup sites that require you to swear the record is your own, and to open federal law enforcement records based on department data its own trainer said was filled in by "supplemental magic." The training admitted "there will be U.S. citizens" among the people checked, and the whistleblower says records have already been opened against citizens — seven weeks before the election.

Source

Primary documents: Padilla and Schumer's release, their letter with the full whistleblower disclosure, and their one-page summary (all linked above). News coverage: Whistleblower Says DHS's Hunt for Unlawful Voting May Have Broken State Laws — The Washington Sun; Senate Dems: Whistleblower Says DHS Voter Fraud Hunters Were Ordered to Break Laws — Common Dreams; Democrats decry DHS hunt for noncitizen voters as election interference — Ariana Figueroa, Arizona Mirror, September 14, 2026. Photo: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin testifies before a House committee on June 3 (Cliff Owen/AP, via NPR).