The Trump administration is making an intense push to identify and deport noncitizens who registered to vote, even if they did so inadvertently or never cast ballots — an unusually aggressive approach that is helping it promote baseless claims that voter fraud is rampant.
State audits and studies have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and there have been no instances in which their votes are known to have swayed an election. It is against federal law for noncitizens to register to vote or actually vote, and doing so can carry steep penalties, including jail time and deportation.
In the past, the Department of Homeland Security has not aggressively tried to deport the relatively small number of noncitizens who unlawfully registered to vote, especially if they mistakenly signed up, according to immigration policy experts. But the Trump administration is taking a harder line in hopes of increasing deportations while also building a case that illegal voting has been underestimated.
Homeland security agents are reopening voter fraud cases that had been closed and investigating voter registration efforts in major cities. Customs officers have detained immigrants suspected of being on the voter rolls at border checkpoints, according to immigration attorneys. And green card holders applying for citizenship have been placed in deportation proceedings for registering to vote.
The department’s efforts are part of the Trump administration’s extraordinary attempt to leverage federal agencies to promote the president’s long-running false claims about a broken election system rife with fraud. Those claims have been used by Mr. Trump to justify his push for federal legislation that would require that people show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and severely restrict voting by mail.
The changes are upending the lives of some green card holders who have lived in the United States for years and maintain that they did not vote or even intend to register.
Abdullah Emre Basar first learned that he was on the voter rolls in Washington State when he applied for citizenship and an immigration officer at his interview last year informed him that he was registered, according to a court filing last month.
Mr. Basar later learned that he was registered in 2014 after visiting the local motor vehicle agency to update his address, said Devin Theriot-Orr, his attorney. The government denied him citizenship and placed him in removal proceedings in April, according to the filing.
Mr. Basar maintains that he never voted or asked to register. Ryan Dosch, a manager at the Spokane County elections office, said in an email that a voter registration record under Mr. Basar’s name was canceled and had no history of a ballot cast.
“It brings a lot of worry and uncertainty,” Mr. Basar said in a statement. “It is putting stress on my marriage, as my wife is a citizen and the unknown is very stressful.”
The administration’s actions have involved a close partnership between the Homeland Security Department and the Justice Department, which has sought to investigate and criminally charge noncitizens with illegal voting. Prosecutors have been instructed to file more charges against those individuals, and the Justice Department has sued dozens of states to obtain voter rolls. The department has also seized on revelations by New Jersey officials that a software glitch led to about 6,600 noncitizens being registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. Roughly 400 of them later cast ballots.
Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has said officials are ready to arrest or deport those who improperly voted in New Jersey. Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, indicated she would resist the Trump administration’s demands to turn over the names of the registrants, who she said ended up on the voter rolls “through no fault of their own.”
Homeland security officials are devoting significant resources to the effort, ordering agents who typically focus on transnational crimes like human trafficking and drug enforcement to hunt for voter fraud, a major shift for an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement known as Homeland Security Investigations.
In June, agents with the unit accompanied F.B.I. agents during a raid of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group that conducts voter registration drives, and actively questioned staff members.
“Conducting voter fraud investigations is a real departure for H.S.I., and is not within the normal scope of their very important criminal investigative work,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration.
In a statement, a homeland security spokesperson said that ICE was rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it could be found.
The Trump administration has also prodded states to upload tens of millions of voter records through SAVE, a federal immigration verification tool run by the Homeland Security Department that the administration revamped to look for noncitizens on the voter rolls.
But there have been problems with the SAVE tool itself. In October, Jane Nelson, the Texas secretary of state at the time, announced that her office had identified 2,724 potential noncitizens who were registered to vote in Texas. But local election officials who looked into the findings at the county level found that many identified by SAVE were actually citizens. An independent investigation in Travis County, Texas, home to Austin, found that 25 percent of the noncitizen matches were citizens, according to court records.
Homeland security officials have continued to push evidence-free claims of widespread election fraud. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said last month that the administration uncovered more than 250,000 cases of noncitizens registered to vote in four states, but provided no evidence to support the finding or details about how officials arrived at that number.
Letters from the Homeland Security Department to some states indicated that the number was probably overestimated, with caveats and based on initial reviews. Some state officials, including in Nevada, have cast doubt on the methods the department used to calculate the estimate.
The intense focus on deporting noncitizens on the voter rolls marks a shift for the Homeland Security Department. Several immigration attorneys said they had clients who were still approved for citizenship under previous administrations if they explained that they mistakenly registered and had no other issues with their cases.
Michael Valverde, who was a senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for more than two decades, said that immigration officers used to have some ability to take into account factors like intent, age and mental capacity in considering whether registering to vote or voting rendered them removable.
“Now officers have very limited discretion, and I am hearing that denials and removal proceedings based on voting are happening more frequently,” Mr. Valverde said.
Attorneys said many of their clients who registered did so inadvertently while obtaining or renewing driver’s licenses, pointing to voter laws that have made it easier for people to register to vote at motor vehicle agencies. Some immigrants lack English fluency and do not realize they are signing registration forms, lawyers said.
Altagracia White, a 61-year-old resident of Woodbury, N.J., who is married to a U.S. citizen, said the federal government was seeking to deport her. Ms. White said she first learned that she was registered to vote after she applied for citizenship and an immigration officer informed her. Ms. White later obtained documents from the state showing that she signed a voter registration application while renewing her driver’s license more than a decade ago.
“I never thought they were telling me to sign to vote or anything like that,” Ms. White said. “At that time, I didn’t even know how to say yes in English.”
The federal government has initiated her deportation to the Dominican Republic, citing her voter registration and claiming she voted in 2020. County records show that Ms. White voted once via mail-in ballot that year. Ms. White denied that she sent the ballot or ever voted.
George Fishman, a deputy general counsel at the Homeland Security Department during the first Trump administration, praised the agency’s efforts to pursue noncitizen voting. Although he said there was a “certain level of unfairness” when it came to noncitizens who inadvertently registered to vote, he thought it was Congress’s responsibility to pass reforms that would prevent them from getting onto voter rolls.
“I think the most vigorous enforcement should be against those who knew they were voting illegally, but the law needs to be enforced,” said Mr. Fishman, a senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that supports lower immigration rates.
Coral Murphy Marcos contributed reporting.
