DHS Voter Fraud Surge Turns Up 30 Cases Across Three States, Not the 24,000 Claimed

Since the Department of Homeland Security's "coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative" launched Tuesday, September 1, across nine states, the paper trail it's produced covers roughly 30 people. This falls far short of the tens of thousands of noncitizens President Trump has repeatedly claimed are illegally registered and voting.

The surge, first reported by CNN based on internal guidance it reviewed, tasked Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit that normally handles human trafficking and drug smuggling cases, with chasing voter fraud leads in Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut. The guidance calls for field interviews and prosecutorial referrals running from early September through mid-October, according to CNN.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has made DHS a lead player in the administration's push on election fraud, according to CNN, including threats to withhold grant funding from states that won't adopt broader voter-roll reforms.

What's Actually Landed on Officials' Desks

Georgia's secretary of state office received an "Immigration Enforcement Subpoena" Tuesday, September 1, requesting voting history and identity documents for 13 individuals, according to a copy reviewed by MS NOW and confirmed by a state election official.

Gabe Sterling, the office's director of special projects, told the Daily Signal the request is small next to Georgia's 8 million registered voters, and said his office is cooperating. "It's an immigration investigation by DHS, so this could be for people they think might have potentially voted, or for people who are applying for citizenship," Sterling said. He added that other states getting similar subpoenas have seen comparably small numbers.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs told MS NOW that Border Patrol officers requested information on two individuals this week. The Wisconsin Elections Commission received subpoenas covering roughly 15 people Thursday, September 3, an election official told MS NOW, adding that everything ultimately handed over is publicly available data.

DHS is standing behind the scale of the underlying problem even as individual subpoenas stay small. A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Signal that its SAVE database program has identified "more than 24,000 cases" of potential noncitizens on voter rolls since April 2025, and that the agency has processed "over 60 million voter verification queries" in that span. DHS also told the Daily Signal its investigators "have repeatedly demonstrated that illegal aliens can and do vote in our elections." Georgia's own office, run by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, has said a review found the state's voter rolls are nearly 100% accurate, a finding DHS disputes.

The Legal Pushback

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights sued the Trump administration Wednesday, September 2, in federal court in Washington, seeking to block DHS from using the federal databases at the center of this effort, according to the Associated Press, as carried by Breitbart. The suit, filed with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, argues the databases can contain outdated information that misidentifies naturalized citizens as noncitizens.

Coalition executive director Angelica Salas called it "voter intimidation" at a Los Angeles press conference. Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California governor acting as a senior adviser to the voting project, said the administration is trying to "intimidate naturalized U.S. citizens." Those are contested characterizations from the plaintiffs' side. DHS has not been found by any court to have engaged in intimidation, and no ruling has been issued in the case.

A DHS spokesperson responding to the lawsuit said the department "accessed publicly available data from states' voter rolls and cross referenced them with known illegal aliens in our systems," according to Breitbart's reporting on the AP story.

The Timing Question

CNN's reporting flags a separate procedural issue. Long-standing Justice Department guidance discourages "overt" investigative actions close to elections specifically to avoid chilling legitimate voting activity, according to the DOJ manual CNN cited. That policy was formally rescinded during Trump's first term but largely followed anyway, then reinstated under President Biden. DHS is a different department and, per CNN, isn't bound by that DOJ policy. The surge guidance makes no reference to election-timing concerns as the midterms approach.

Andrea Flores, a former DHS official under the Obama and Biden administrations, told MS NOW the small subpoena numbers undercut the administration's own framing. "The small numbers of subpoenas that they've issued show that this is not the widespread phenomena they wanted the public to believe it could be," she said, adding that Congress should ask why the agency is prioritizing this over "transnational criminal investigations."

More subpoenas are expected as the initiative runs through mid-October, per the guidance CNN reviewed. The CHIRLA lawsuit is still pending with no ruling yet. Whether the surge produces prosecutions, or mainly a paper trail confirming citizens already legally registered, remains an open question the coming weeks should start to answer.