A federal whistleblower alleges that a Trump administration initiative to identify noncitizen voters ahead of the November elections may violate state laws and wrongly implicate U.S. citizens. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) probe, dubbed the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” reportedly requires federal employees to misrepresent themselves when using state voter lookup tools and to create official records based on unreliable data.
The anonymous disclosure, released Monday by Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, includes screenshots and transcripts from DHS training sessions. According to the whistleblower, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) staffers were instructed in late August to cease other duties and complete a brief training to review DHS-provided lists of individuals. They were tasked with running these names through state voter registration systems to identify “unlawful voters,” with agents reportedly required to review 40 individuals per day.
Schumer and Padilla stated that the initiative appears to be an attempt by President Donald Trump to interfere in elections. They expressed concern that the tight timelines would prevent proper investigation and noted the potential for problematic federal findings due to unreliable data that may differ from state records. The senators have sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding the initiative be halted.
The Trump administration has focused on noncitizen voting as a potential source of fraud in the midterm elections, despite research indicating such instances are extremely rare. The administration has also advocated for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified U.S. citizens and has pursued legal action to obtain detailed voter data from numerous states.
The whistleblower claims that federal employees were directed to pose as individual voters to access state voter records, circumventing a lack of state-provided data. Some state voter lookup tools, such as Virginia's, explicitly restrict access to individuals attesting under penalty of law that they are checking their own records. California's system requires personally identifiable information like a driver's license number or partial Social Security number.
When employees raised concerns about potential liability for searching these tools against state guidance, the whistleblower stated that agency leaders instructed them to proceed. A DHS spokesperson, in response to an earlier lawsuit by an immigrant rights group, stated the department was "laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens," adding that the agency used publicly available data cross-referenced with immigration records. The DHS initiative was first reported by The New York Times in early September. The whistleblower account was released by the Democracy Defenders Fund, a watchdog group representing the whistleblower, citing an "extreme fear of retaliation."