The RecordExhibit 158
Sending agents after suspected noncitizen voters on flawed data, blocked in nine states before the election
Ruled unlawful means: A court ruled against it. Some rulings are on appeal.
Homeland Security's 'Unlawful Voter Initiative' combed voter rolls for suspected noncitizen voters and sent investigators into the field. On Oct. 21, 2026, a federal judge in Oakland barred its election-related field operations aimed at likely citizens in nine states until polls close on Nov. 3, finding they likely intimidate people who help others vote.
What happened
According to the report, the department surged personnel into the effort, and agents went through voter rolls by typing personally identifiable information into public-facing state websites to check a person's voting history. Some of those sites, Virginia's among them, require users to attest to who they are before searching. Time reported the allegation as agents in effect posing as the voters or as people acting for them.
The whistleblower says this happened with the knowledge and at the direction of headquarters leadership, that each officer had a quota of at least five people an hour and 40 a day, which leaves twelve minutes to decide whether someone is a citizen, and that the training materials acknowledge the voter data contains inconsistent information. The whistleblower is anonymous and is a client of the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund, which gave the report to Sen. Alex Padilla of California.
Padilla and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer released it and asked the department to halt the initiative, warning that unreliable data could disenfranchise eligible voters or disrupt election administration. The New York Times first reported the initiative earlier in September. No court or watchdog has examined the whistleblower's allegations about the state voter sites.
On Oct. 7, 2026, Democracy Forward released 166 pages of internal Homeland Security Investigations reports from May and June, obtained through a records request, that describe a 'phased national initiative' on noncitizen voting. According to CNN and States Newsroom, the reports say investigators took in 50.6 million records from a Justice Department dataset and 48.4 million records that Heather Honey, a senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, obtained from unidentified independent sources; Palantir's ELITE tool was used to process state voter rolls, and 26,563 ICE-derived records were prioritized for vetting in Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
By late May the division had opened 418 voter-fraud cases and made 64 administrative arrests, with 318 of the cases not referred for prosecution. The reports describe reviews of dozens of nonprofits and voter-registration groups, mainly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including 82 in Pennsylvania; many found no wrongdoing, while the Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations was flagged for further investigation and the teachers' union Education Minnesota was among 22 groups being researched.
A June 1 report discusses using undercover agents against groups suspected of registering noncitizens, and other records describe undercover surveillance of anti-ICE activists in Minnesota and plans with the FBI for search warrants at seven Ohio canvassing centers tied to the firm Black Fork Strategies.
On Sept. 17, 2026, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones wrote to Secretary Mullin demanding that the department confirm in writing whether it directed anyone to access Virginia voters' information without their permission and preserve related records, including access logs, correspondence and training materials; the letter says Virginia's election code does not permit disclosure of that protected information to the federal government without a court order, and the state limits its lookup tools to people who attest under penalty of law that they are looking up their own records. The AP's report of the letter carried no response from the department.
Where it stands
Ruled unlawful, at the preliminary stage. On Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, in California Nurses Association v. Mullin, ordered Homeland Security officers in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin to stop election-related field operations and field interviews that target people they know or suspect are U.S. citizens, or that rest wholly on USCIS matching data without further investigation, until polls close on Nov. 3.
In a 19-page order she found the operations likely violate the Voting Rights Act's ban on intimidating people who help others vote or encourage them to vote, called the voter lists 'voluminous and unreliable', and said the time limits on each review add to the risk of error. She relied on the harm to the plaintiffs' voter assistance and mobilization work and did not find that their members' own right to vote was infringed, and the plaintiffs did not claim that investigating unlawful voting is itself illegal.
The plaintiffs are the California Nurses Association, National Nurses United, the Voto Latino Foundation, San Francisco and Santa Clara County. She held the order until 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 23, so the government could appeal; we found no report of an appeal or a stay. The AP describes the order as halting the investigations; NPR and CBS describe it as barring field operations aimed at likely citizens, the narrower reading used here.
The order is temporary and ends with the election; it is not a final ruling. No court has ruled on the whistleblower's claim that agents broke state laws by using state voter lookup sites.
The administration's side
A Homeland Security spokesperson told NPR the department used publicly available data from states' voter rolls and cross-referenced it with noncitizens known to its systems, and called that an easy step to secure elections. The spokesperson said the investigations are carried out diligently and professionally, that there is no quota, and that the department will pursue every illegal voter.
By the whistleblower's own account, the legal office at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services advised that agents could use state voter websites for adjudicative or investigative purposes. A Homeland Security spokesperson told CNN the department has been transparent about using publicly available voter files, which are analyzed by USCIS's fraud detection directorate, and that it and the Justice Department are focused on prosecuting and removing noncitizens who vote. HSI, DHS and ICE did not answer States Newsroom's questions.
After the Oct. 21 ruling the department said it is 'laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote' and has no plans to question or investigate people it believes are U.S. citizens.
Sources
Permanent link: https://unredactedrecord.com/e/voterhunt/