California won’t be last state to face DOJ ‘noncitizen voter’ challenges, documents suggest 

The Trump administration has offered few specifics on how it created the list of alleged noncitizens on California’s voter rolls, which is at the center of its lawsuit against the state.

But the list appears to have been created using a deeply flawed process recently disclosed by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whistleblower, court filings in the lawsuit suggest.

That matters because the DHS process described by the whistleblower scrutinized voters nationwide, not just Californians. As a result, it would strongly indicate that the Trump administration has lists — with all the flaws the whistleblower described — on several states, and potentially all states.

The whistleblower said the investigation — called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” — posed a particular risk for Californians: They could face disenfranchisement and even criminal investigations because their state has uniquely rigorous data privacy protections, meaning DHS would be working with less detailed information about voters.

Now, that concern appears to have come true.

This month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent California elections officials a DHS-produced list allegedly containing the names, birthdates and addresses of around 20,000 likely noncitizens registered to vote in the state. It then filed an extraordinary lawsuit to block California officials from counting the affected voters’ ballots and pressed charges against 28 people on the list.

And growing evidence suggests the DOJ suit against California is just the start.

Making the list

At the center of both the initiative and DHS’s California list is the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS), a specialized unit in DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). 

This unit normally investigates suspected immigration fraud and national security threats. But beginning in August, the Trump administration reassigned much of the directorate to hunt for evidence for President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that illegal voting by noncitizens is rampant in U.S. elections.

To that end, the whistleblower said Homeland Security leaders tasked FDNS immigration officers with finding potential matches between hundreds of thousands of voters on state registration lists and people in federal immigration records.

If someone’s registration or voting data could be linked to an immigration record, officers were ordered to create a law enforcement report, called a TECS record, against that person. The record was then passed on to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. TECS records could initiate additional scrutiny against flagged individuals, including possible criminal proceedings.

DHS’s California list appears to have been created the same way.

In court declarations, FDNS Associate Director Nicolas Bartell said “immigration officials who are trained to determine citizenship status” manually reviewed California’s public registration roll to match voters with immigration records.

After the review, Bartell said, “FDNS compiled a refined list of individuals who the agency believes are highly likely to be noncitizen aliens registered to vote in the 2026 federal election in California and then FDNS provided HSI with the refined list of individuals.”

Bartell said FDNS first “enhanced” California’s “raw voting record data” with personal information that the agency obtained from LexisNexis’ Accurint, a large-scale analytics platform that aggregates billions of public records to create highly personal data profiles on people.

Bartell’s Accurint disclosure directly aligns with the whistleblower’s report. Because public voting records generally do not include unique personal identifiers — like Social Security and driver’s license numbers — and may not include people’s registration date and voting history, the anonymous official said DHS could not match voting data alone to immigration records or determine whether someone illegally registered or voted.

To fill this gap, the whistleblower said DHS used Accurint and Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR, a similar analytics platform, to get people’s personal information and voting records and combined that data with state registration records.

Limited data, unlawful actions

But the DOJ’s disclosures omit the numerous ways the administration’s processes for identifying noncitizens on state voter rolls could wrongly flag someone as a noncitizen — shortcomings the whistleblower detailed.

The official said FDNS officers were assigned a strict quota of 40 reviews a day, giving them only a few minutes to resolve complex questions of identity and citizenship to determine whether someone should be flagged as an unlawful voter. And agents were required to produce TECS records against people even when they strongly doubted the accuracy of the data they were cross-referencing.

California posed an additional challenge, the whistleblower said. Because of the state’s privacy rules, DHS obtained the state’s voter data from unclear sources. 

As a result, agents were reluctant to file TECS records against Californians because they had limited means to corroborate the data. Still, FDNS agents were required to assume the voter records were factual — even if they conflicted with other data available to them.

“The result is that a significant number of TECS records, potentially thousands or tens of thousands, will be created against California residents based on data that an officer may have good reason to believe is unreliable or inaccurate without corroboration,” the whistleblower warned.

With other states, FDNS agents used voting data from Accurint to corroborate DHS-provided data. But the database was less useful in California: FDNS agents could not obtain Californians’ specific voting data — like their registration date or voting history — from the tool, because the state’s election code explicitly bars companies from collecting and selling its election-related data.

The only way agents could verify DHS-provided registration records, the whistleblower said, was by using people’s personal information, including their Social Security numbers, to access individual voting records through California’s registration portal. However, doing so meant FDNS agents were essentially impersonating people and potentially violating the state’s privacy laws.

When agents raised concerns about the legality of searches, USCIS leaders said individual officers “would not be personally liable for conducting the searches when they are done as part of their official duties and properly documented,” the official said.

Calling citizens noncitizens

While the whistleblower was particularly concerned that the initiative would erroneously flag naturalized citizens as noncitizens, Los Angeles County’s analysis of a 7,035-person sample of DHS’s list found that roughly 1 in 4 people appeared to be natural-born citizens who marked the U.S. as their birthplace. 

It’s unclear why birthright citizens would appear on the DOJ’s list. Because natural-born citizens acquire citizenship at birth, it’s highly unlikely they would interact with DHS in a way that would generate a factual record associated with them that could be matched with California’s voter data.

DHS officials have pushed back on Los Angeles’ analysis. But according to the whistleblower, FDNS agents were required to watch a training video that acknowledged Social Security numbers associated with voters “may not be accurate” and told agents not to rely solely on the numbers.

The video also reportedly said that U.S. citizens sponsoring their foreign-born spouses’ immigration cases could lead to further mix-ups with Social Security numbers.

“In other words, the current process is knowingly sweeping known US citizens in as potentially “unlawful voters,” the whistleblower said.

Just the beginning?

There are also signs the process described by the whistleblower is being used against other states.

On Oct. 26, Charles Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney in Seattle, sent Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs a letter demanding that his office set aside potential ballots from 405 people whom DHS has flagged as noncitizens. 

At a press conference that day, Floyd broadly described how DHS identified the alleged noncitizens — an account that overlapped with both the DOJ’s explanation of the California list and the whistleblower’s account.

“Let me explain our methodology. DHS has obtained publicly available lists of registered voters in Washington. Those lists are compared with DHS information to identify registered voters who are not citizens,” Floyd said. “We then further investigate to see if that person actually cast ballots in Washington.”

That strongly suggests this process can be applied to any other state the Trump administration decides to target.