by Peter Elkind, Jen Fifield, Doug Bock Clark, Ken B. Morales and Andy Mannix, ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Reporting Highlights:
- Inflated Claims: HSI deployed its tech platform to find noncitizens on voter rolls, despite warnings from agency insiders that it would lead to an “ungodly” number of false positives.
- Privacy Concerns: DOJ leaders ignored internal concerns that transferring voter lists to HSI for criminal investigation might not be legal.
- Scant Results: Despite intense White House pressure, the effort has produced only a few dozen noncitizen voter prosecutions nationwide — and even fewer convictions.
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.
“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.
“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.
He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.
But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.
According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results. The administration plowed forward anyway.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results. “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment.
A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).
Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”
Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.
Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.
Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.
“HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency.
Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy
As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged. Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.
Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure.
Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a database that could be used to surveil political participation.
Collapsing Claims
By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting. Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.
Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.
Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.
“Far-Reaching Consequences”
Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting. Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.
Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions, including threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens.
“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”
Misty Harris contributed research. William Turton and Avi Asher-Schapiro contributed reporting. Pratheek Rebala and Carla Astudillo contributed data reporting.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Filed under Democracy, Trump Administration.