The Department of Homeland Security alleges that a quarter-million noncitizens may be registered to vote in four states, and the White House is using the findings to pressure Congress on proof-of-citizenship legislation before November.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters in July to election officials in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania claiming a preliminary review found more than 256,000 potential noncitizen voter registrations across those four states. California topped the list at an estimated 190,832, followed by New Jersey at 35,152, Nevada at 15,903, and Pennsylvania at 14,576. Mullin requested state cooperation to verify the findings against federal immigration records, Fox News reported, framing the effort as essential to protecting election integrity.
The letters arrived weeks before a Census Bureau report claiming 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in the 2020 presidential election. President Trump cited the Census findings in a Truth Social post and has been pressuring Republican senators to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. The bill cleared the GOP-led House but remains stalled in the Senate, blocked by a Democratic filibuster.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said evidence of noncitizen voting is continuing to "pile up." The administration's posture is clear: treat the midterms as a test of whether states will cooperate on voter-roll integrity or resist federal oversight.
DHS matched voter registration records with federal immigration data using names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers, AP News reported. All four states named in the letters had declined to use the federal SAVE citizenship verification database, prompting DHS to conduct its own review using publicly available voter records. Mullin warned that states could face funding cuts, investigations, or even penalties if they refuse to participate in the audit program.
But several of the states pushed back hard.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, wrote a letter this week revealing that DHS officials acknowledged during a recent meeting they did not have high confidence that the 14,576 people referenced in their initial letter were in fact noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Schmidt said federal officials promised to provide their methodology, and Pennsylvania was still waiting for it.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, was blunter. In her response to Mullin, she wrote:
"I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official."
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, also a Democrat, said he did not understand the methodology the federal government used but maintained his state had done its part.
"All I can say is we have done significant work to make sure our voter rolls are as clean as possible."
New Jersey offered the most concrete admission. Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill disclosed that approximately 6,600 noncitizens were improperly registered through the state's motor vehicle system in 2023 and 2024. Those individuals answered "no" when asked whether they were citizens but were registered anyway, a vendor failure the governor said her administration is now correcting by replacing the company responsible.
Sherrill said fewer than 400 of those improperly registered noncitizens had actually voted. That figure is significant, it confirms the problem is real, but it is a long way from the 35,152 noncitizen registrations DHS alleged in its letter. The gap between what New Jersey found on its own and what DHS claims remains unexplained, with no public methodology bridging the two numbers.
Cases like New Jersey's are not isolated. Previous reporting on noncitizen voting in New Jersey has documented the state's ongoing struggle to keep its voter rolls accurate, raising questions about how long the motor vehicle registration loophole went unaddressed.
The Census Bureau's report, described as a "beginning analysis", claimed 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in 2020. The Bureau used a commercially available voter file and checked it against federal records. But Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said details typically included in such a report about error rates were missing entirely.
Levitt told reporters:
"This is an empty manila folder that the administration will wave around when it says the elections were fraudulent, noncitizens voted."
Kathy Boockvar, a former Democratic secretary of state in Pennsylvania who now runs a nonpartisan election security firm, said she viewed the administration's release of the report as part of a strategy of "doing everything it can" to push the SAVE legislation through the Senate.
The administration has reason to press the issue. A DHS memo titled "Preventing Alien Voting" noted that states participating in the SAVE system had already identified 400,000 deceased registrants and over 28,000 noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The contrast is pointed: states that cooperated found problems; states that refused are now being told their rolls may be far worse.
On Friday, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles arrested a Honduran national on charges alleging he fraudulently registered to vote. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli called the arrest "the first of many to come" and warned that "there's no telling how many noncitizens are currently registered to vote" in California, a state with a handful of competitive U.S. House races in November.
The arrest is the kind of concrete enforcement action that gives the broader DHS claims operational weight. The case marks the first arrest under the Trump administration's election integrity push, and Essayli's language signaled prosecutors intend to treat it as the opening move, not a one-off.
Voter fraud prosecutions have picked up in other states as well. Michigan's attorney general filed charges against five noncitizens for voting illegally in 2024, and a Colombian illegal immigrant was sentenced to three years for voting fraud and identity theft in a separate case. Each prosecution undercuts the claim that noncitizen voting is so rare it does not warrant federal attention.
The election integrity push is reaching state campaigns. Bobby Charles, the Republican candidate for governor in Maine, confirmed an audio recording this week in which he said he plans to ask Trump's border czar to send U.S. marshals and ICE agents to polling places to ensure that only legal voters cast ballots.
Charles's comments drew immediate criticism from opponents who framed the idea as voter intimidation. But the recording reflects a broader shift in Republican politics: candidates at every level are now running on election security as a core issue, not a fringe concern.
Democratic officials have a different reading of the administration's actions. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said plainly:
"Trump is trying to lay the groundwork to reject the '26 election. He's trying to destabilize both confidence and actual election administration. His efforts to destabilize election information, administration are not working."
Alexandra Chandler, director of impact programs for free and fair elections at the Democracy Project, echoed that view:
"Throw out these deceitful, deceptive claims as an excuse for disruptions. You can deny the results later."
The Democratic argument is that the administration is manufacturing a crisis to justify rejecting unfavorable midterm outcomes. But that argument has a problem: New Jersey's own Democratic governor confirmed thousands of noncitizens were improperly registered. Pennsylvania's Republican secretary of state is asking DHS for better data, not dismissing the concern outright. And federal prosecutors just made their first arrest.
Critics who want to dismiss the issue entirely have to explain away the registrations that states themselves have acknowledged.
The SAVE America Act would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It passed the House but cannot clear the Senate's 60-vote filibuster threshold. Trump continues to pressure Republican senators to find a path forward, and the administration's steady release of noncitizen voting data, the DHS letters, the Census report, the Los Angeles arrest, reads like a campaign to build public pressure for the bill.
A 2025 University of Maryland study estimated that 21.3 million Americans who are eligible to vote do not have, or do not have easy access to, documents proving their citizenship. Critics of the SAVE Act cite that figure as evidence the law would suppress legitimate votes. Supporters counter that the same documentation gap is what allows noncitizens to slip onto voter rolls undetected.
DHS did not return requests for comment from the Associated Press. Mullin, in separate remarks, framed the administration's position as straightforward: "We absolutely can build confidence in the American people, but the states have to do their part."
Whether the data holds up to scrutiny or falls apart under peer review, one fact is already settled: states that refused to audit their own rolls are now being audited by the federal government. The only question left is whether Congress will act before voters head to the polls, or leave the system exactly as it found it.
