{"id":4732,"date":"2026-08-14T13:07:41","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4732"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:07:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:07:41","slug":"trump-admins-massive-push-to-prove-voter-fraud-just-completely-backfired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4732","title":{"rendered":"Trump admin’s massive push to prove voter fraud just completely backfired"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota\u2019s U.S. attorney\u2019s office, received an urgent email from Washington.<\/p>\n

Read more The forgotten tape proving the GOP never stopped rigging democracy<\/a><\/p>\n

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump\u2019s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.<\/p>\n

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn\u2019t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report \u2014 within hours.<\/p>\n

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who\u2019d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.<\/p>\n

\u201cBottom line up front,\u201d he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating \u201ca complete lack of understanding\u201d of illegal voting investigations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,\u201d Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been \u201cdysfunctional.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he\u2019s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was \u201cso vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.\u201d To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI\u2019s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s well known the administration has tasked HSI \u2014 a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises \u2014 with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.<\/p>\n

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI\u2019s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda \u2014 and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.<\/p>\n

According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency\u2019s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.<\/p>\n

The administration plowed forward anyway.<\/p>\n

HSI\u2019s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who\u2019d publicly echoed Trump\u2019s claims about elections. He argued the agency\u2019s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.<\/p>\n

Those searches went forward, ProPublica\u2019s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.<\/p>\n

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer \u2014 41 \u2014 were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)<\/p>\n

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,\u201d Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica\u2019s request for comment. \u201cNoncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

A DHS spokesperson didn\u2019t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI\u2019s work. The agency wouldn\u2019t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced \u201cpublicly available data\u201d from state voter rolls with information on \u201cknown illegal aliens\u201d in its systems. \u201cIt\u2019s not rocket science,\u201d the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica\u2019s questions. \u201cIt\u2019s an easy step to secure our elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teirab and the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Minnesota declined to comment.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an array of reasons why Trump\u2019s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn\u2019t succeeded. Most obviously, it\u2019s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump\u2019s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.<\/p>\n

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency\u2019s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one thing if you\u2019re going after Pablo Escobar,\u201d said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. \u201cIt\u2019s another thing if you\u2019re going after some cleaning lady who\u2019s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement\u201d<\/h3>\n

Trump\u2019s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9\/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices \u2014 virtually its entire top field hierarchy \u2014 signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE\u2019s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president\u2019s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.<\/p>\n

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who\u2019d run the agency\u2019s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.<\/p>\n

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency\u2019s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He\u2019d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.<\/p>\n

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he\u2019d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.<\/p>\n

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him \u201ca critical member of the Trump administration\u201d who was \u201ccleared\u201d in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently \u201cpromoted six times under multiple administrations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one thing if you\u2019re going after Pablo Escobar. It\u2019s another thing if you\u2019re going after some cleaning lady who\u2019s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.\u201d
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration\u2019s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.) <\/p>\n

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cStephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,\u201d said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) \u201cSalisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there\u2019s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early July 2025, Frank Qui\u00f1ones, an HSI special agent who\u2019d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency\u2019s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Qui\u00f1ones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.<\/p>\n

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government\u2019s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.<\/p>\n

Qui\u00f1ones was a true believer in Trump\u2019s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab\u2019s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab\u2019s technology to identify illegal voters \u2014 even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Qui\u00f1ones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

For proof of concept, Qui\u00f1ones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he\u2019d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI\u2019s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as \u201ca little insane,\u201d one recalled \u2014 both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don\u2019t include voters\u2019 unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI\u2019s data would produce mismatches \u2014 what the staffer called an \u201cungodly\u201d number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They \u201cdidn\u2019t want to touch this,\u201d the staffer added. Qui\u00f1ones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: \u201cThe president wants this!\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI\u2019s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica\u2019s questions to the facilities\u2019 parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)<\/p>\n

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they\u2019d found large numbers of noncitizens on Qui\u00f1ones\u2019 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they\u2019d found \u201c5,000 high-confidence illegal voters\u201d in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state\u2019s office, which oversees the state\u2019s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)<\/p>\n

The apparent breakthrough couldn\u2019t have come at a better time.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.<\/p>\n

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters\u2019 citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn\u2019t. Most states also refused the Justice Department\u2019s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency\u2019s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ\u2019s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.<\/p>\n

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Qui\u00f1ones touted the solution he\u2019d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI\u2019s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Qui\u00f1ones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.<\/p>\n

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the \u201cHSI Tool\u201d as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government\u2019s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica\u2019s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey\u2019s \u201cexpertise in election administration\u201d was \u201cinvaluable to the Department\u2019s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a \u201cvery significant number\u201d of \u201cpotential non-citizens.\u201d (Sikma didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: \u201cIt is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.\u201d<\/p>\n

Running \u201cRoughshod\u201d Over Privacy<\/h3>\n

As the push to use HSI\u2019s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.<\/p>\n

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.<\/p>\n

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters\u2019 addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens\u2019 partial Social Security numbers or driver\u2019s license information, too.<\/p>\n

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person\u2019s information can\u2019t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.<\/p>\n

From the outset, the Trump administration\u2019s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.<\/p>\n

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.<\/p>\n

Read more Conservatives complain MAGA has morphed into everything it hated<\/a><\/p>\n

Instead, the DOJ\u2019s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel\u2019s office explained, according to internal emails.<\/p>\n

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE\u2019s use.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there\u2019s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager
<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency\u2019s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.<\/p>\n

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he\u2019d rewritten an initial draft memo to \u201cmake the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request \u201cpertinent and relevant\u201d information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security \u201ccoordinate\u201d to fulfill the requests.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving slept on it,\u201d Winn wrote, \u201cI ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.<\/p>\n

Winn\u2019s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be \u201ctransferred\u201d to HSI, with one exception: Voters\u2019 party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.<\/p>\n

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any \u201cappropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said \u201cI can\u2019t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government\u2019s actions, saying \u201cno one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.\u201d DHS echoed the DOJ\u2019s view, calling such information sharing \u201cessential to protecting America\u2019s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls\u201d and \u201can easy step to secure our elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sus said that by pooling voters\u2019 sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has \u201crun roughshod\u201d over privacy laws and is creating a \u201c1984-style database\u201d that could be used to surveil political participation.<\/p>\n

CREW filed a that argues it\u2019s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.<\/p>\n

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS\u2019 systems amounted to \u201ca mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.\u201d On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it falls into the wrong hands, it\u2019s not the government that suffers. It\u2019s me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collapsing Claims<\/h3>\n

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.<\/p>\n

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI\u2019s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Qui\u00f1ones\u2019 unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who\u2019d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.<\/p>\n

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab\u2019s databases, though it\u2019s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included \u201cas many as\u201d 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.<\/p>\n

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.<\/p>\n

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica\u2019s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.<\/p>\n

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Qui\u00f1ones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president\u2019s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office\u2019s cases; seven others are pending.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.<\/p>\n

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.<\/p>\n

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren\u2019t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who\u2019d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren\u2019t citizens. Many had never voted.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted <\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota\u2019s U.S. attorney\u2019s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters\u2019 records. The demands \u201cpresented a host of issues,\u201d Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n

\u201cAn unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,\u201d Teirab complained. \u201cInstead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.<\/p>\n

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators\u2019 ignorance about \u201cthe nuance of elections administration.\u201d The rate of purposeful election crime is \u201cmicroscopic,\u201d he said. \u201cThe very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.<\/p>\n

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.<\/p>\n

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.<\/p>\n

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. \u201cSorry again for piecemealing these to you,\u201d one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County\u2019s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to \u201cwitch hunts\u201d that ate up staff time.<\/p>\n

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio\u2019s two U.S. attorneys\u2019 offices for an \u201celection integrity\u201d update, asking: \u201cHow close are we to complaints\/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you\u2019ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.<\/p>\n

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn\u2019t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn\u2019t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.<\/p>\n

Now, however, U.S. attorneys\u2019 offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.<\/p>\n

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who\u2019d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They\u2019ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn\u2019t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.<\/p>\n

\u201cFar-Reaching Consequences\u201d<\/h3>\n

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government\u2019s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president\u2019s claims about noncitizen voting.<\/p>\n

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations \u2014 including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering \u2014 have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who\u2019d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn\u2019t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.<\/p>\n

Cases like this \u201cdon\u2019t just stop,\u201d said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. \u201cWhen you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.\u201d<\/p>\n

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI\u2019s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS \u2014 often to investigate drug trafficking \u2014 plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including \u201cchanges in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,\u201d said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.\u201d
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.<\/p>\n

Though HSI\u2019s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.<\/p>\n

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who \u201cknowingly\u201d fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,\u201d said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. \u201cWhen federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s inflation time bomb is about to go off: Nobel economist<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A frantic internal email leaked from a top federal prosecutor exposed a disorganized, high-pressure scramble that yielded just a single referral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump admin's massive push to prove voter fraud just completely backfired - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4732\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump admin's massive push to prove voter fraud just completely backfired - 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