ICE’s investigative arm is now probing Arizona’s elections

As the Trump administration moves to relitigate past elections, the investigative branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is probing Arizona’s 2020 election results, Arizona’s Attorney General Kris Mayes told Democracy Docket Tuesday.

Opened by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the probe is the latest prong in the Trump administration’s attack on the 2020 race, which President Donald Trump lost to former President Joe Biden.

“The Trump administration is engaged in an unserious investigation into an election that took place six years ago based on nothing but conspiracy theories and lies,” Mayes said in a statement to Democracy Docket.

HSI’s investigation comes as the FBI has opened a similar probe into the election results in Maricopa County, where the majority of Arizona’s population is located. The new probe is separate from the FBI inquiry, according to The Atlantic, which first detailed HSI’s investigation. 

A primary component of ICE, HSI predominately investigates transnational crimes like human trafficking, cybercrime and financial fraud, but it also has a hand in probing voter fraud cases involving noncitizens. 

As Trump continues to baselessly allege widespread illegal voting by noncitizens, leaders at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — which oversees ICE  —  have recently pressed HSI investigators to pursue voting-related cases.

DHS and ICE did not respond to Democracy Docket’s requests for comment.

While it’s unclear whether HSI’s Arizona probe is focused on individual voting fraud cases, its recent inquiry with the Mayes’ office indicates that the agency is broadly looking into the state’s previous election results.

“At the request of local leadership at Homeland Security Investigations, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office provided them with public records from the 2020 election investigation conducted under the prior Attorney General, Mark Brnovich,” Mayes said. 

According to The Atlantic, Matthew Murphy, Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, initially contacted Mayes’ office. When state investigators pressed Murphy on why HSI was scrutinizing Arizona’s election results, he said he was acting on “direction from D.C.”

HSI’s probe was opened roughly a week after outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held an extraordinary election-security press conference in Arizona in mid-February.

Held in an HSI field office in Scottsdale, the conference amounted to a rally for the SAVE America Act, which election experts have described as the most restrictive voting bill ever considered by Congress.

“Your state has been an absolute disaster on elections,” Noem said of Arizona, alleging widespread voter fraud by noncitizens in the state. However, when pressed by reporters, Noem could not cite any specific examples.

Before the conference, Noem met with a handful of far-right election deniers, including Justin Heap, the Maricopa County recorder. Several days later, Heap’s office claimed in a press release that, during a recent review of voter registration data, it had identified 137 non-citizens who were registered to vote in the county, 60 of whom had voted in prior elections.

Heap’s office conducted the review using the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, which is notorious for mislabeling naturalized citizens as noncitizens. 

The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office did not respond to Democracy Docket’s questions about whether it has recently been contacted by HSI investigators. 

The documents Mayes gave to HSI investigators related to a six-month investigation into Maricopa County’s handling of the 2020 election, which was carried out by her predecessor, Republican Mark Brnovich.

In an “initial report,” Brnovich said that his office found no proof of fraud in Maricopa County, but claimed that it identified “serious vulnerabilities” in the vote. 

After Brnovich left office, the Attorney General’s Office revealed that he had suppressed a report prepared by investigators that concluded that none of the allegations of election fraud in Maricopa County had merit. 

“The Attorney General’s Office spent 10,000 hours investigating every claim made by election deniers, from bamboo ballots imported from China to Italian spy satellites flipping votes to President Biden,” Mayes said.

“After this exhaustive investigation, a September 2022 summary prepared by the Attorney General’s Office stated: In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” she added. “Those conclusions were true then and they remain true now. There was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election in Arizona.”

On Monday, Warren Petersen, the Republican President of the Arizona Senate, said he recently received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena from the FBI seeking documents related to a legislative audit into Maricopa County’s federal election results.

The chaotic months-long audit ultimately reinforced Biden’s victory in Arizona. And while it included several accusations against Maricopa County in a final report, the county then meticulously refuted those claims. 

By subpoenaing documents related to the audit, the FBI likely received images of ballots, absentee envelopes, the tally of cast votes and elections-related software through the subpoena, according to the Washington Post.

In a Senate hearing last month, Todd Lyons, the acting chief of ICE, noted that HSI has a hand in investigating allegations of voter fraud.