The Department of Homeland Security has identified more than 250,000 illegal immigrants registered to vote across California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all states that refused to use a federal citizenship verification system, according to an internal DHS memo obtained by Just the News.
The memo, titled "PREVENTING ALIEN VOTING," lays out the results of a DHS review of publicly available voter data in the four holdout states. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin followed up with formal letters to state election officials in each state, outlining the agency's findings and requesting cooperation to verify voter identities.
The numbers are not small. California alone accounts for roughly 190,832 of the flagged registrations. New Jersey follows with approximately 35,152. Nevada had about 15,903 and Pennsylvania about 14,576, figures that together total more than 256,000. DHS plans to expand the probe to additional states.
At the center of this fight is the SAVE program, a federal citizenship database that cross-references voter rolls against immigration records using Social Security numbers. The Trump administration has offered the system to every state. Georgia, Ohio, and Tennessee are among those that have used it. California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania declined.
States that did participate turned up 400,000 deceased registrants and over 28,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote. The four that refused produced a far larger problem, nine times as many alleged non-citizen registrations, when DHS ran its own review using publicly available data instead.
The DHS memo drew a direct conclusion from that gap:
"There is an undeniable pattern emerging as DHS begins to unravel the horrific damage done by the open border policies of the Biden administration. States that have adopted alien-first policies instead of American-first policies have a disproportionate number of non-citizens on their voter rolls."
That language is sharp, even by government-memo standards. But the underlying comparison, 28,000 non-citizen registrations found in cooperating states versus 250,000-plus in just four that refused, speaks for itself.
Secretary Mullin did not stop at sending letters. Fox News reported that Mullin announced sweeping enforcement measures, including potential fines and prison time for election officials who receive DHS information about ineligible voters and refuse to act on it.
"If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time."
Mullin also posed a pointed question to the states still sitting on the sidelines. Only 23 states currently participate in the SAVE program. "Every state that's not participating with us should be asked the hard question why not? What are you afraid of?" he said.
The Department of Justice has separately warned all 50 states that criminal charges are possible for officials who allow noncitizens to remain on voter rolls, a signal that the federal government intends to treat this as more than a paperwork dispute.
President Trump delivered a speech on election integrity the same day the memo surfaced, citing Intelligence Community findings that China had compromised more than 200 million voter records across at least 18 U.S. states. The scope of that allegation, separate from the non-citizen registration issue, underscores the administration's broader concern about the security of American elections.
Trump also addressed the resistance from Democratic-led states. The New York Post reported that the president ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct immediate removal of ineligible voters. "Since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that," Trump said.
The Post's reporting put the total figure at 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote, described as the highest number ever publicly reported in U.S. history.
Mullin framed the issue in plain terms: "Only Americans should be electing American leaders."
The four states flagged in the DHS memo share a common trait: all are led by Democratic officials, and all refused a federal tool designed specifically to catch the problem DHS now says it found. That refusal did not make the problem go away. It made the problem harder to find, until DHS went around the states and looked at publicly available data on its own.
The question of non-citizen voter registration has been treated for years by much of the political establishment as a fringe concern. Critics dismissed it as vanishingly rare and not worth the friction of tighter verification. The DHS memo puts a number on it, a quarter-million in just four states, and that number is difficult to wave away.
Declassified FBI files have previously shown that the Justice Department under the Biden administration blocked a full probe of alleged voter registration fraud in Michigan, raising questions about how long these problems have been allowed to fester without serious federal scrutiny.
Nor is the problem limited to registration rolls. ICE recently arrested an Australian national charged with illegally voting in two federal elections in Louisiana, a concrete case that illustrates what happens when verification systems fail or are bypassed entirely.
The DHS memo raises as many questions as it answers. The agency has not publicly detailed the methodology it used to identify alleged non-citizens from publicly available voter records. It has not explained what specific datasets were cross-referenced or how the results were validated.
None of the four states, California, Nevada, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, have publicly responded to the DHS findings or Mullin's letters, at least not in the available reporting. Whether those states will cooperate, push back, or challenge the findings in court remains to be seen.
DHS has also not clarified which "multiple additional states" will be subject to the expanded probe, or whether the 250,000-plus figure from the four non-participating states should be added to the 28,000 found in cooperating states for a combined national total.
The administration is pushing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Breitbart reported that Mullin pledged aggressive follow-through regardless of legislative action: "Before and after the election, we will scrub all election records looking for illegal aliens and those who are ineligible to vote, including those that somehow voted yet they were deceased."
That promise puts every state on notice. And it puts a particular spotlight on the DOJ's parallel warnings to election officials that allowing noncitizen voting could result in criminal prosecution.
The DHS memo does not prove that 250,000 non-citizens cast ballots. It says they were registered. The distinction matters legally. But it also matters practically: a quarter-million people who should not be on the rolls were on the rolls, in states that refused the one federal tool designed to catch them.
California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania were offered a system to verify citizenship. They said no. DHS checked anyway and found exactly the kind of problem the system was built to prevent. The states now face a choice: cooperate with the federal government to clean their rolls, or explain to voters why they would rather not know.
Secretary Mullin asked the right question. If a state has nothing to hide, why refuse to look?
