Lawsuit seeks evidence of federal immigration agency’s role in Trump’s voter purge plans

A pro-democracy legal group sued Tuesday for access to public records that could shed light on a federal immigration agency’s involvement in President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.

The group, Democracy Forward, believes that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is working to identify and purge people from the voter rolls under two anti-voting executive orders Trump issued in March 2025 and March 2026.

“Lawmakers have questioned whether the Trump-Vance administration has lawfully obtained voter data and called for greater transparency,” the lawsuit states.

Democracy Forward went to court after USCIS failed to disclose the public records, despite multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about the agency’s involvement in Trump’s unprecedented attempts to restrict mail voting to a pre-approved list of people and to create a national voter list.

Democracy Forward also requested records related to the agency’s usage of the expanded Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Originally created to help the government determine an individual’s immigration status for public benefits, the Trump administration has retrofitted the database to use it as a deeply flawed citizenship check for voter eligibility.

The group also asked USCIS to expedite document and communications production, but was denied.

“As the Trump administration considers pursuing criminal charges against election officials for failing to remove alleged non-citizens from voter lists, despite widespread evidence that many individuals identified by SAVE as alleged non-citizens have proven to be citizens, it is imperative that records showing the basis for such actions be released to the public,” Democracy Forward stated in that request.

The group is specifically seeking communications between the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which handles voting issues, and USCIS. It also wants any communications between the White House and USCIS dealing with SAVE.  

It also requested communications between USCIS and two prominent election deniers who now hold official roles in the Trump administration: Heather Honey and Kurt Olsen.

Honey is deputy assistant secretary for election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security and Olsen is a senior attorney with the Justice Department and former election security czar at the White House.

Democracy Forward noted that Trump’s recent unfounded claims that more than 250,000 noncitizens are on state voter rolls were a catalyst for its suit.

“The Trump-Vance administration can’t claim it’s protecting elections while hiding the facts from the public,” Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president, said in a statement. “Americans deserve evidence, not rhetoric.”