Trump's Homeland Security Department has been investigating the groups that help Americans register to vote. And it talked about sending undercover agents to do it.

That's what internal reports from May and June show. They were written by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, the immigration agency. A pro-democracy group called Democracy Forward got them through a public records request and released them on Wednesday, October 7, Stateline reported.

Here is what the reports say the department did:

• It reviewed 82 nonprofits in Pennsylvania alone. Groups in Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Ohio were looked at too.
• It flagged Pennsylvania's chapter of CAIR, one of the country's leading Muslim civil rights groups, "for further investigation."
• It started researching 22 more organizations, including a Minnesota teachers union.
• It gathered tens of millions of records to search for voter fraud, from the Justice Department and from what it called "independent sources."
• And it looked for chances to use undercover agents against groups it suspected of signing up noncitizens.

All of this is aimed at a problem that barely exists.

Undercover agents and "predatory" voter drives

The June 1 report describes groups that "may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal alien registration and voter encouragement." It says organizations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania remained areas of focus.

Then it spells out the goal:

"The objective is to determine potential opportunities to leverage UC (undercover) resources, including the possible deployment of undercover agents (UCAs), to support investigative efforts in the field."

Read that phrase again: "voter encouragement." The report pairs it with registering noncitizens, but it never says where suspect "voter encouragement" ends and the ordinary kind begins. Encouraging people to vote is what a voter registration drive is for. It is what churches, unions, student groups and civic clubs do every election year.

Some of the department's own research came up empty. The June 1 report says it finished looking at about 41 nonprofits in New Jersey and found "no derogatory information." It looked at 20 nonprofit funds tied to a charitable foundation in Washington, D.C., and found nothing there either.

Who got flagged

The Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations was "flagged for further investigation." CAIR runs voter registration drives to help Muslim Americans take part in elections.

"Our voter registration program follows all applicable voter registration rules and requirements," said Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu, the chapter's executive director.

The report does not say what CAIR is supposed to have done wrong. But CAIR has been a Republican target for a while. In Texas, Greg Abbott declared it a terrorist organization, with reasons that closely match an anti-Muslim think tank's report. Now a federal agency has the group's Pennsylvania chapter on a list for more investigation, for registering voters.

Education Minnesota, the state's teachers union, was named as one of 22 organizations the agency was just starting to research. Its president, Monica Byron, said the union found out about it on Tuesday, from Democracy Forward.

"We do not know the details of any investigation into our union, but we will not be deterred in encouraging all eligible members to exercise their right to vote in the upcoming election," Byron said.

Tens of millions of records

The reports also show how much data the department pulled in.

Heather Honey, a Homeland Security official, got 48.4 million records through what the reports call "independent sources of information." The agency drew on another 50.6 million records from the Justice Department. The reports don't say what the records are.

Honey is not a neutral record-keeper. Before she became the department's deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, she was a Pennsylvania activist whose 2020 research misused incomplete state data to falsely claim Pennsylvania had more votes than voters. Trump repeated that claim in his speech on January 6, 2021, before the attack on the Capitol. She has come up in our reporting before: she was copied on the Homeland Security email that listed places that print ballots in other languages, attached to a checklist for prosecuting voters.

The Justice Department records matter because of what the department has been demanding from the states. It has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for their full voter lists, which include driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, according to the Brennan Center's tracker. Twenty-six of those lawsuits have been thrown out. But at least 16 states have handed over their full lists, or said they will.

What happens to the data once it lands at Homeland Security? The June 1 report says 26,563 records from ICE were picked for "downstream vetting," focused on Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Records were sent to a lab for "secondary enrichment and identification of high-value targets."

The same pattern, again

This isn't the first time this fall that Homeland Security's voter hunt has been exposed from the inside. In September, a whistleblower said the department pulled hundreds of officers off their regular work and had them pose as voters to search state voting records. Its own training video admitted, "there will be U.S. citizens in this population."

And the tool the department uses to check citizenship gets real citizens wrong. In one Missouri county, the rebuilt SAVE database flagged 691 voters as noncitizens, and at least 81% of them turned out to be wrong. The Supreme Court let the administration go back to using it anyway.

A problem that barely exists

Noncitizen voting is rare. Studies have found that again and again, Stateline notes. The Justice Department has brought a few dozen cases this year. About 154 million people voted in 2024.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood next to Attorney General Todd Blanche to announce charges against 10 people in Minnesota. A grand jury charged them over illegal voting; prosecutors say seven of them voted in the 2024 election. All 10 are legal permanent residents, people with green cards.

"Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: We will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences, including criminal charges and deportation," Mullin said.

Breaking the law should be punished. But a few dozen cases is not a reason to put dozens of nonprofits and a teachers union under review, flag a Muslim civil rights group, and talk about sending undercover agents into voter drives.

Homeland Security and ICE didn't answer Stateline's questions. The department says it has no plans to target polling places.

"This trove of ICE documents provides chilling new insights into the breadth and depth of the Trump-Vance administration's efforts to pursue baseless claims of widespread election fraud and assert greater federal control over elections ahead of the 2026 midterms," said Hart Wood of Democracy Forward.

What the documents show

Internal reports from Trump's Homeland Security Department show its ICE investigators reviewed 82 nonprofits in Pennsylvania alone over voter registration, flagged the state's CAIR chapter for more investigation, began researching 22 more groups including Minnesota's teachers union, and looked for chances to use undercover agents against groups it suspected of registering noncitizens and of "voter encouragement." The department pulled in tens of millions of records to hunt for noncitizen voting, a crime so rare the Justice Department has brought only a few dozen cases this year. About 154 million people voted in 2024.

Source

Documents Show ICE Obtained Millions of Voter Records, Probed Nonprofits in Pennsylvania and Other States — Jonathan Shorman, with Jacob Fischler, Stateline, via the Bucks County Beacon, October 7, 2026