The Department of Homeland Security is using legally questionable tactics and relying on unreliable data to investigate non-citizen voting, a whistleblower alleged in a report released by top Senate Democrats Monday.
The disclosures prompted accusations by Democrats and voter advocates of a sweeping dragnet that could ensnare eligible voters, as President Donald Trump has made finding proof of mass non-citizen voting — shown in studies to be exceedingly rare — a top priority of his administration.
Much of the whistleblower’s disclosures focused on training materials for DHS agents tasked with carrying out an investigatory effort known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”
The effort is looking at voter records of “50 states and is targeted at up to hundreds of thousands of individuals,” lawyers for the whistleblower said in the report. Officers were ordered to investigate noncitizens as well as naturalized US citizens who may have registered or voted before they were naturalized.
After the late August launch of program, DHS agents working in a fraud detection unit of US Citizenship and Immigration Services were given just a few weeks to sift through the voter records of thousands of individuals and create law enforcement files known as TECS records for individuals determined to have voted unlawfully.
The whistleblower report alleges that the agents are being kept in the dark about the sources of some of the data being used in the review, and the process leads to individuals...
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