ICE amassed millions of voter records in sweeping fraud hunt, documents reveal

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms.

That is according to dozens of documents obtained from ICE by Democracy Forward through a recent Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking information about the immigration agency’s involvement in elections.

The findings offer one of the clearest pictures yet of how deeply the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement apparatus has become involved in elections — an area primarily administered by state and local officials.

At the center of the effort is Heather Honey, a longtime promoter of false claims about the 2020 election, now a senior adviser to the ICE director and senior counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin.

Democracy Docket has previously reported on Honey’s growing role inside the administration’s election-related operations and her involvement in efforts to obtain and scrutinize state voter data.

The new records show that:

• ICE’s investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), obtained 48.4 million voter records from “independent sources of information” connected to Honey, describing the data as part of a “strategic line of effort” for voter fraud investigations.
• The agency separately obtained 50.6 million records from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and more than 26,000 records derived from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, prioritizing records from states including Texas, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Ohio. 

• HSI considered deploying undercover agents to investigate nonprofit organizations involved in voter registration, initially focusing on Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Investigators planned to identify the organizations using special search engines for nonprofits and then search other databases for what the records called “derogatory information.”
• State voter-roll information may have been entered into Palantir’s ELITE system, an ICE tool used to identify, prioritize and locate people targeted for immigration enforcement.
• HSI explored investigations involving voting machines and “counties with 2020 results,” while also monitoring primary elections for “trends, vulnerabilities, or indicators” that could affect what the agency described as election integrity. 
• The agency coordinated with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service on voter fraud investigations.

The documents could also shed new light on a question state election officials have repeatedly raised as the Trump administration has sought their voter files: where the information goes once states turn it over to the federal government and how it is ultimately used.

ICE did not immediately respond to Democracy Docket’s request for comment.

*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of Democracy Forward’s board.