You want to find voter fraud? You're looking in the wrong place
By Peter Elkind, Jen Fifield, Doug Bock Clark, Ken B. Morales and Andy Mannix for
ProPublica
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| Looking for voter fraud? Here are filings by Vic Mellor, Republican, on June 16 with the Justice Department as an agent of the Cuban government. Mellor wants to win the Sept. 9 Republican primary here in Rhode Island so he can run against Rep. Seth Magaziner (D) for the Second Congressional District seat. Aside from the huge question of what the hell is Mellor doing representing the Cuban government, note that on his filing he lists his home address as Florida. Mellor filed his candidacy notice on November 1 with the Federal Election Commission, giving a Rhode Island address. That is contradicted by this filing made by him more than six months later. One of these two failings was false. |
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases
to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens
was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security
Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched
to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive,
Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the
election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that
Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express
approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report —
within hours.
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run
unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality
check.
“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by
ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been
referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local
election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a
complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.
“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,”
Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”
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| Ken Paxton wants to find voter fraud. Did he look here... |
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has
launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by
noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.
He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a
nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so
vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the
Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents
asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just
four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how
that number was calculated.
It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.
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| Did he look in the mirror? |
But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.
According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.The administration plowed forward anyway.
We are continuing our reporting on how the Trump administration has enlisted HSI agents and technology in unprecedented ways to enforce immigration laws and to bring cases against suspected noncitizen voters. Do you work at HSI and have information you can share with us? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201, or you can contact Peter Elkind at peter.elkind@propublica.org or on Signal at 817-691-3110. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.
HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at
least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a
midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued
the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the
voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most
confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department
had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel
states to turn over the unredacted versions.
Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows,
helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across
the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results
were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of
Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were
referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally
or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the
most recent presidential election.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, administration
officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful
results.
A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few
prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what
tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced
“publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known
illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson
wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy
step to secure our elections.”
Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined
to comment.
There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document
claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s
exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state
audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or
when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that
a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be
registered (fewer than 400 voted).
The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen
voters aligns with Trump’s attempts
to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and
fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has
tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and
voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.
Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called
the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of
aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal
voting.
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who
handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice
Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s
been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her
80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”
Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the
agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump
administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top
field hierarchy — signed
a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s
deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But
when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency
would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin
obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.
Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even
before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury,
a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy
homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen
Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.
Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he
once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye
blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling
out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.
To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d
overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in
a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency
review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI
supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the
administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against
Salisbury, however.
Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from
ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump
administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and
was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of
carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally
issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former
agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of
anonymity out of fear of retribution.)
Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented
reassignment of more
than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting
most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at
noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and
Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by
ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.
“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric
Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the
agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with
former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going
to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be
no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of
federal law enforcement.”
In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent
who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI
Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find
noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica.
Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had
previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that
had been enlisted into voting investigations.
The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.
Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about
election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts,
ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been
stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources
who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify
illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included
identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond
to ProPublica requests for comment.)
For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February
2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through
HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one
recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include
voters’ unique
identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would
produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false
positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding
safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch
this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring:
“The president wants this!”
Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed
running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical
platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all
of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.
Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies,
including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)
Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)
The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better
time.
The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify
noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.
The administration had hoped to persuade states to check
their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien
Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also
refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter
rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s
plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue
for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over
elections to the states.
In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration
officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab:
using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could
fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.
By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)
The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter
rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of
paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”
Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy
As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information
gained momentum, a new problem emerged.
Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including
specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls
wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal
emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.
The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive
information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political
parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included
voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16
states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ
had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information,
too.
Federal laws, particularly the
Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can
be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have
to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s
information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to
limited exceptions.
From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to
combine data across
federal agencies has repeatedly
drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere
to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for
example, a
judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches,
ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS
access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has
appealed that ruling.
In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand
over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned
into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two
former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.
But this exception was meant to be used to get information
on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people
suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump
administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that
eventually limited SAVE’s use.
“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he
is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s
going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army
knife of federal law enforcement.”
Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.
In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d
rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement
far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”
Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn
proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific
people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland
Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.
“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that
our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration
data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that
99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United
States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the
establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil
liberties of Americans.”
Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd
Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.
Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned,
however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered
language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI,
with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible,
it said.
The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just
two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it
permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation
of potential violations of federal election law.”
In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t
really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s
actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and
coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien
voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential
to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter
rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”
Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal
identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration
has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database”
that could be used to surveil political participation.
CREW filed a lawsuit
in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that
argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception
to justify mass sharing of voter information.
Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns,
saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a
mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a
non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing
increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to
identity theft.
“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the
protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands,
it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”
Collapsing Claims
By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out
across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.
About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as
potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s
cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over
money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said.
Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing
whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were
naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.
Still more leads came from running public voter rolls
through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources
told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched
using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000
noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said
that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.
Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.
Once federal investigators started digging into these cases,
however, they often fell apart.
Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen
people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ
data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14
cases.
The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern
District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI
agent), a staunch
Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political
opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven
others are pending.
Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen
voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more
than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states
have more than 40 million registered voters.
Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI
investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into
cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups
Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.
Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas
and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was
inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded
voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t
registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register,
they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d
been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many
had never voted.
“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw
unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much
unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy
and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”
Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email
urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted
Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international
crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis
at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S.
attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least
six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host
of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for
comment.)
“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in
Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already
discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab
complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded
many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of
understanding of the investigation.”
In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents
subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica.
Only six turned out to live there.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said
the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of
elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is
“microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some
sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday
human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred
for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered
voters.
Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its
unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have
struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.
In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than
1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government,
claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in
Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign
Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.
The agents bombarded local election officials with requests
for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again
for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler
County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks.
Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of
Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch
hunts” that ate up staff time.
In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S.
attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are
we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into,
how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”
As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for
prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state
has nearly 8 million voters.
In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to
pursue charges against noncitizen voters
who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without
evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources
into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.
Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different
approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or
deportation.
In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal
voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d
registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024
presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an
interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she
could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment
from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of
Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled
to go to trial in September.
“Far-Reaching Consequences”
Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations —
including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money
laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen
voting and immigration enforcement.
In February 2026, according to court files and emails
reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate
child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads
on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that
he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation
and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving
at least five 14-year-old girls.
Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year
HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time,
those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”
Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been
HSI’s most urgent work. According to an
annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to
investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous
year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including
“changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”
“It’s never been a better time to be involved in
transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official
who retired in early 2025.
“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of
plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings
making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon
In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core
mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal
cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive
orders.
Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only
a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump
administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.
Its latest tactics include threatening
to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their
voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will
prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens.
Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which
would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote,
a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats
are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the
polls to intimidate voters.
“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with
far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United
Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in
elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust
in government itself.”
How We Counted Voter Fraud Cases
To count voter fraud case referrals, we analyzed the May
2026 release of the Justice Department’s national
caseload data. We examined both active and closed criminal referrals made
between Jan. 20, 2025, and May 31, 2026. We counted referrals the DOJ listed as
election fraud or where the lead charge was one of a set of voting fraud
statutes identified in internal memos. We also examined public court documents
to identify every prosecution where those statutes were charged. All
prosecutions we included involve alleged noncitizen voters.
Misty
Harris contributed research. William Turton and Avi Asher-Schapiro contributed
reporting. Pratheek
Rebala and Carla Astudillo contributed
data reporting.
