A DHS Whistleblower Says Officers Were Told to Pose as Voters on State Election Websites to Hunt 'Unlawful Voters,' 40 a Day, After a 105-Minute Training Video. The Files Include U.S. Citizens.

A whistleblower inside the Department of Homeland Security says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers have been ordered to log into state voter-registration portals while pretending to be the voters themselves, using personal data pulled from DHS databases, to build a list of "unlawful voters" ahead of the November midterms. Sens. Alex Padilla of California and Chuck Schumer of New York made the disclosure public Monday and sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow demanding the searches stop immediately.

According to the disclosure, which Padilla's office received on Sept. 8, USCIS leadership told personnel in the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate on Aug. 21 to set aside their regular work. By Aug. 25, officers were reviewing voter records for what the agency calls the "Unlawful Voter Initiative." Hundreds of officers received a single training video lasting about one hour and 45 minutes, then were expected within three business days to process 40 subjects a day, roughly 12 minutes each. The initiative was expected to wrap up by Sept. 12.

Many states restrict their online lookup tools to the voter in question. Virginia's portal requires a date of birth and the last four digits of a Social Security number and makes users certify that "it is unlawful to access the record of any other voter, punishable as computer fraud under Va. Code § 18.2-152.3." Florida, Massachusetts and California carry similar restrictions. The whistleblower says officers who raised concerns about breaking those laws were told to proceed anyway. "The whistleblower's disclosure outlines shocking allegations of unlawful and unethical conduct including potentially thousands of violations of state law," Padilla said. Schumer put it more bluntly: "DHS is telling officers to lie to do it."

The senators say the data driving the searches is one the agency itself distrusts. Training materials describe the underlying list as compiled with "supplemental magic," and the disclosure says DHS acknowledged inconsistencies between its records and the states'. Even so, officers were directed to create records in TECS, a federal law enforcement database, against people on the list. The agency's own materials concede that "there will be U.S. citizens in this population." Naturalized citizens flagged by the program face secondary inspection when they return through a port of entry, consequences for immigration benefits, and referral to Homeland Security Investigations for possible prosecution, generally without knowing they were flagged or having a way to correct the record.

The program follows a string of courtroom defeats for the administration's attempts to obtain state voter rolls. The Justice Department sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for their files, and federal judges rejected the effort in every case, with one calling it "unprecedented and illegal." The whistleblower's account also comes after Mullin claimed in July that Nevada's voter file "revealed that there may be as many as 15,903 non-citizens registered"; in later private meetings with state officials, DHS said the actual number of "potential" noncitizens was 185 and called the larger figure a ceiling.

Padilla and Schumer asked Mullin and Edlow to halt the initiative, hand over the records being used, remove the law enforcement flags it generated and report to Congress by Sept. 21. "Donald Trump and his Administration are obsessed with election conspiracy theories and operate under the wrong assumption that they are above the law," Padilla said. The League of Women Voters called the allegations "a five-alarm fire for American democracy." The whistleblower asked for anonymity, citing "extreme fear of retaliation."