Whistleblower Says DHS’s Hunt for Unlawful Voting May Have Broken State Laws

Immigration officers are potentially violating state laws about voter data and using unreliable information to create law enforcement records stating that naturalized U.S. citizens voted before obtaining citizenship, according to a new whistleblower report.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) made the complaint public Monday and said it raises concerns about the accuracy of the Department of Homeland Security’s probe into immigration-related election fraud.

The unidentified whistleblower is a public servant with direct knowledge of the Unlawful Voter Initiative launched in August, according to the report the Democracy Defenders Fund submitted to the lawmakers last week.

Immigration officers working for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were tasked with finding out whether immigrants and naturalized citizens voted illegally. They were trained to do so by claiming to be the subjects of the investigation or acting on their behalf on state government websites, a potential violation of state laws, according to the report.

“The Whistleblower reports that given the nature of the Initiative, the pressures put on officers, and the instructions given by headquarters, it is likely the case that no officer who has sought to access information on a state website has been truthful about his or her identity,” the report states. “The Unlawful Voter Initiative includes all 50 states and is targeted at up to hundreds of thousands of individuals.”

DHS is using publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross-referencing them with known immigrants in the department’s system, a spokesperson said in a statement Monday night.

“Far from being rushed or untrained, these investigative efforts are conducted diligently and professionally,” the DHS spokesperson said. “Identification and investigation of aliens who vote in our elections provides an essential guarantee in the authenticity of our election results.”

Officers received a video training on Aug. 21 and were required to begin the probe on Aug. 25, with an assigned quota of at least five reviews per hour, according to the report, meaning employees had roughly 12 minutes to determine each case. DHS in a statement denied the existence of a quota for finding criminal conduct.

The video training said some information that wasn’t in the source data for the investigations would be “brought in through supplemental magic,” according to the whistleblower complaint. “Magic is not a recognized form of record keeping under state or federal law,” it notes.

DHS has been touting arrests of immigrants it claims illegally voted.

“The only magic being performed here is the media conjuring controversy out of commonplace law enforcement,” the department spokesperson said.

The investigation swept in naturalized citizens, regardless of how recent their contact with DHS had been, the whistleblower report says. “It is irrelevant if a subject naturalized decades ago, has no current applications with USCIS, or even if they’re deceased,” the report states. “All that matters is that the DHS source data indicates that they are a subject with an alien number that registered to vote or voted.”

Schumer described the report as a “bombshell whistleblower complaint” in a Monday press conference.

“The length Trump will go to cheat, lie and steal in this upcoming election are simply beyond the pale,” Schumer said. “Apparently, agents are being commanded to violate state laws to access private voter information and fabricate law enforcement records as part of DHS’s ‘unlawful voter initiative.’”

Another whistleblower complaint released this month outlined the U.S. Postal Service’s plans to implement President Donald Trump’s mail-in ballot restrictions. The complaint said this could result in millions of voters not getting ballots or receiving them late.

This story has been updated with a statement from DHS.