Trump Administration Sharing Voter Data Across Agencies, DHS Confirms

The Trump administration Thursday confirmed that voter registration data being collected by the Department of Justice (DOJ) is being shared with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of a broad push to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the government is finally doing what it should have all along — sharing information to solve problems,” an unnamed DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement to Democracy Docket. “This collaboration with the DOJ will lawfully and critically enable DHS to prevent illegal aliens from corrupting our republic’s democratic process and further ensure the integrity of our elections nationwide. Elections exist for the American people to choose their leaders, not illegal aliens.”

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can address them, scrub aliens from voter rolls, and identify what public benefits illegal aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the DHS spokesperson added.

The assertion that illegal citizens vote in large numbers, often repeated by Trump, has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. 

After this story was first published, a DOJ spokesperson responded to a request for comment. “Enforcing the Nation’s elections laws is a priority in this administration and in the Civil Rights Division. Congress gave the Justice Department authority under the NVRA, HAVA, the Civil Rights Act (CRA), and other statutes to ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections,” the unnamed DOJ spokesperson wrote in an email. “The recent request by the Civil Rights Division for state voter rolls is pursuant to that statutory authority, and the responsive data is being screened for ineligible voter entries.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the administration plans to compare voter data collected by DOJ to a different database maintained by DHS, in order to find registered voters who are listed by immigration agents as noncitizens. Reuters also reported that the DOJ wants to provide the voter roll information to Homeland Security Investigations for use in criminal and immigration-related investigations. 

The DOJ has sent demands to dozens of state election officials to hand over their complete  voter rolls, and is said to have plans to ask every state. In at least one case, it has threatened legal action against states that refuse to cooperate. 

The DOJ letters claim they are seeking the information to ensure compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), but legal experts have their doubts.

“Data on particular individuals isn’t particularly helpful in enforcing the NVRA/HAVA provisions the letters cite,” Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights division, told Democracy Docket recently. 

Many states have refused to comply with the DOJ’s demands, citing privacy laws and a lack of legal justification for the requests. 

Under the 1974 Privacy Act, whenever the government proposes to use a private individual’s data in a new manner, the agency is supposed to provide notice in the Federal Register detailing the purpose, to allow the public and Congress to weigh in. To date, there has been no notification published in the Federal Register. 

At the same time that DHS is looking to use voter registration information to identify unlawful immigrants, the agency has been making its own databases available to state and local election officials to check the validity of their voter rolls. 

Trump ordered DHS in March to expand the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s (USCIS) Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program for use in checking the citizenship of registered voters and make it free for state election officials to use. 

NPR reported this week that SAVE has been used to check 33 million voters since an Aug. 15 update to the system, which allows administrators to make bulk searches using just voters’ name, their date of birth and the last four digits of their Social Security.

SAVE uses various federal databases to flag whether someone is a non-citizen, and was originally developed to check eligibility for federal benefits programs through one-by-one queries. 

On Thursday, congressional Democrats announced new legislation to limit ICE’s ability to pull personal data from other federal agencies. Reps. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) and Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) are cosponsoring a pair of bills, one preventing the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from sharing data with ICE, and another blocking the Department of Housing and Urban Development from doing the same. 

“We must ensure our personal data is not weaponized for arrests, detentions or deportations, especially when immigration enforcement is conducting lawless, reckless and brutal raids that sweep up innocent people,” Kamlager-Dove said. 

“This administration is rolling back civil liberties and terrorizing our immigrant communities, and in recent months, Trump has opened up a new front,” Vargas said. “This administration is now going after the personal, sensitive data of millions, and trying to turn it over to immigration enforcement officials.”

This story has been updated.