Watchdog sues DHS for records on secretive hunt for noncitizen voters after midterms

A government watchdog sued the Trump administration Thursday, seeking to uncover records of a secretive federal initiative to identify alleged noncitizen voters — an effort that a whistleblower warned could wrongly target eligible voters.

The challenge comes after the Trump administration vowed to scrutinize voting records from the midterms and after a whistleblower raised alarms about an immigration agency’s hunt for alleged illegal voters.

The lawsuit, filed by American Oversight against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), seeks records detailing the government’s so-called “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” including the data sources, investigative quotas and training materials behind the program.

On Election Day, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that his department would scour voting records after the election.

“We’ll be gathering the voting logs, and we’ll be going through those and making sure that no illegals voted,” Mullin told reporters.

But questions remain about how the administration identifies suspected noncitizen voters, what information federal officials rely on and what safeguards exist to prevent eligible Americans from being wrongly targeted.

“The election may be over, but the Trump administration’s efforts to cast suspicion on American voters is far from finished,” American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement. “As Americans showed up to the polls, Secretary Mullin announced plans to comb through voting records in pursuit of a noncitizen voting problem the evidence shows doesn’t exist.”

The watchdog’s lawsuit stems from an extraordinary whistleblower disclosure made public in September by Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

The whistleblower alleged that USCIS had diverted officers from its Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to search through voter data for supposed unlawful voters, instructing employees to misrepresent themselves to gain access to state voter records.

Officers were allegedly required to review at least five people per hour and 40 per day, giving them roughly 12 minutes to investigate each person. The whistleblower warned that those quotas left officers insufficient time to thoroughly examine individual cases, increasing the likelihood of errors.

Officers also allegedly did not know the source of the voter data they were reviewing.

An internal training video cited in Thursday’s lawsuit underscored the risks.

“There will be U.S. citizens in this [data] . . . unfortunately, we’re relying on the data we have available . . . the way that the systems work, it’s not perfect,” officers were told, according to a transcript of the training cited in the complaint.

Three days after the whistleblower disclosure became public, American Oversight submitted six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking records about the initiative.

Among the materials the group is seeking are communications from top administration officials, including Mullin, Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar, DHS Senior Counselor Heather Honey and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow.

The watchdog also wants records detailing the initiative’s investigative quotas, training materials and communications between senior immigration officials and election offices in 19 states and Washington, D.C.

Crucially, the lawsuit seeks records identifying the sources of the voter data supplied to immigration officers and the software or systems used to analyze that information.

American Oversight is not seeking the sensitive voter data itself.

Nearly two months after the watchdog submitted its requests, neither agency has produced any records, according to the complaint.

DHS acknowledged one request on Oct. 17, a month after it was submitted, but denied the group’s request for expedited processing and has not communicated with American Oversight since.

USCIS has not responded to any of the five requests submitted to it.

American Oversight is asking a federal judge to order both agencies to expedite the requests and produce all responsive, nonexempt records within 20 days of a court order.

The initiative is part of a broader Trump administration effort to use federal immigration and citizenship data to scrutinize voter rolls and investigate alleged noncitizen voting, despite a lack of evidence that such voting is widespread.

American Oversight has also sued the administration over its expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which has been increasingly used to check the citizenship status of people on state voter rolls.

Chukwu warned that the administration’s continued focus on alleged noncitizen voting, coupled with the whistleblower’s allegations, risks wrongly targeting eligible voters and casting doubt on legitimate election results.

“The public deserves to see the rules, the data, and the quotas behind this operation and know what safeguards are in place to protect eligible voters,” Chukwu said. “We’re going to court to demand those answers.”