ICYMI: Trump Admin Pursues “Unusually Aggressive Approach” on Noncitizen Voting to “Promote Baseless Claims that Voter Fraud is Rampant”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 11, 2026 

Washington, D.C. – New reporting from The New York Times revealed that the Trump Administration has launched an “unusually aggressive approach that is helping it promote baseless claims that voter fraud is rampant” in their effort to identify and deport noncitizens who registered to vote. Notably, this includes people who have never cast a ballot. 

"Instead of working to bring down costs for working Americans, the Trump Administration is using every lever of government power to attack our elections and our voters — manufacturing fraud claims with zero evidence to justify making it harder for eligible Americans to vote. This isn't about protecting our elections, it’s about protecting President Trump’s power,” said Cole Leiter, Executive Director of Americans Against Government Censorship.

Read the highlights below: 

NYT: Homeland Security Intensifies Pursuit of Noncitizens on Voter Rolls

The Trump administration is making an intense push to identify and deport noncitizens who registered to vote, even if they did so inadvertently or never cast ballots — an unusually aggressive approach that is helping it promote baseless claims that voter fraud is rampant.

State audits and studies have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and there have been no instances in which their votes are known to have swayed an election. It is against federal law for noncitizens to register to vote or actually vote, and doing so can carry steep penalties, including jail time and deportation.

In the past, the Department of Homeland Security has not aggressively tried to deport the relatively small number of noncitizens who unlawfully registered to vote, especially if they mistakenly signed up, according to immigration policy experts. But the Trump administration is taking a harder line in hopes of increasing deportations while also building a case that illegal voting has been underestimated.

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The department’s efforts are part of the Trump administration’s extraordinary attempt to leverage federal agencies to promote the president’s long-running false claims about a broken election system rife with fraud. Those claims have been used by Mr. Trump to justify his push for federal legislation that would require that people show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and severely restrict voting by mail.

The changes are upending the lives of some green card holders who have lived in the United States for years and maintain that they did not vote or even intend to register.

Abdullah Emre Basar first learned that he was on the voter rolls in Washington State when he applied for citizenship and an immigration officer at his interview last year informed him that he was registered, according to a court filing last month.

Mr. Basar later learned that he was registered in 2014 after visiting the local motor vehicle agency to update his address, said Devin Theriot-Orr, his attorney. The government denied him citizenship and placed him in removal proceedings in April, according to the filing.

Mr. Basar maintains that he never voted or asked to register. Ryan Dosch, a manager at the Spokane County elections office, said in an email that a voter registration record under Mr. Basar’s name was canceled and had no history of a ballot cast.

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Homeland security officials are devoting significant resources to the effort, ordering agents who typically focus on transnational crimes like human trafficking and drug enforcement to hunt for voter fraud, a major shift for an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement known as Homeland Security Investigations.

In June, agents with the unit accompanied F.B.I. agents during a raid of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group that conducts voter registration drives, and actively questioned staff members.

“Conducting voter fraud investigations is a real departure for H.S.I., and is not within the normal scope of their very important criminal investigative work,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration.

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Homeland security officials have continued to push evidence-free claims of widespread election fraud. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said last month that the administration uncovered more than 250,000 cases of noncitizens registered to vote in four states, but provided no evidence to support the finding or details about how officials arrived at that number.

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