Homeland Security Agents Are Harassing American Voters of Foreign Origin

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is running a program that “harasses and coerces American citizens exercising the fundamental right to vote,” according to a lawsuit filed last week by several institutions in California.

The Unlawful Voter Initiative is a program by the Trump administration to hunt down noncitizens illegally voting in U.S. elections. Earlier this month, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and Alex Padilla (D–Calif.) published evidence from an unnamed whistleblower showing that the initiative is “knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens” for investigation and possible interrogation by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents.

A transcript of a training video states that DHS is cross-referencing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data with voter rolls and other information “brought in through supplemental magic.” (It isn’t clear what “supplemental magic” means.) The video acknowledges that the USCIS database includes naturalized U.S. citizens and even American-born citizens married to foreigners, but instructs officers to check if the naturalized citizens had registered to vote before gaining their citizenship.

Officers are given a quota of five subjects per hour to review and potentially add to TECS, a federal criminal watchlist, according to the whistleblower report. HSI—which normally handles human trafficking, drug dealing, and child exploitation—has been ordered to start interrogating people suspected of voter fraud as part of a “surge” starting on September 1, a document leaked to CNN states.

Just as the whistleblower warned, Americans have ended up in the crosshairs of the investigation. DHS sent a list of 185 alleged noncitizen voters to the state of Nevada, only to discover that every single one of them was actually a U.S. citizen, The New York Times reported on Thursday afternoon.

The city and county of San Francisco and the county of Santa Clara are now suing, alongside the California Nurses Association, which claims that at least one of its members has been intimidated out of in-person voting, and Voto Latino, a get-out-the-vote nonprofit founded by actress Rosario Dawson and businessman Phil Colón. The lawsuit alleges that HSI agents “will engage in coercive confrontations with American citizens in a manner that intimidates voters.”

The plaintiffs are asking the court to ban DHS from “deploying DHS agents to the homes of U.S. citizens to interrogate them about voter eligibility” or otherwise “interfere with the midterm elections.”

Asked by Reason for comment on the lawsuit, the DHS press office said that it needed more time to respond and has not responded to multiple follow-ups as of publication time.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told Fox News on Saturday that the department is “looking into” 300,000 cases and has 1,620 cases “under investigation,” of which 151 have resulted in arrests. But Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told reporters on Tuesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has only charged 70 people total with unlawful voting since the beginning of the second Trump administration in January 2025.

DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels admitted to AP News that some of HSI’s claimed arrests from “voter fraud investigative leads” were not for illegal voting. In other words, HSI is using the voter rolls and USCIS database to conduct a much broader fishing expedition into any federal offenses.

DHS immigration enforcers “have also in other contexts shown an inability to target only non-U.S. citizens. They have on countless occasions profiled, harassed, and unlawfully detained U.S. citizens,” the California lawsuit states. “Thus, although U.S. citizens should in theory have nothing to fear from immigration agents, Defendants’ conduct has instilled wide-ranging fright among citizens—especially citizens with perceived links to immigrant communities.”