DHS is using legally questionable tactics to investigate voter fraud, whistleblower says

By Tierney Sneed, Gabe Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — 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 being tagged as unlawful voters even if the agent “reasonably believes that the DHS source data is not reliable enough to justify creating a TECS record.”

The flag could have implications for those individuals in their dealings with the government going forward, setting them up for increased screenings when crossing the border and more investigation by DHS. But Democrats alleged Monday that the initiative demonstrates Trump’s broader goal to sow doubt about elections, particularly as Democrats are expecting to win back control of at least one chamber of Congress this fall.

“The truth is, this has nothing to do with protecting the integrity of our elections,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said at a press conference Monday. “That’s just a pretext. It’s about the potential of using manufactured evidence to intimidate voters, to disenfranchise eligible Americans and even undermine or challenge this November’s election results, a classic Trump play.”

CNN has reached out to DHS for comment on the whistleblower report.

The Trump administration has broadly defended its efforts by saying its goal is to ensure that only people legally entitled to cast ballots do so.

The training materials instructed agents to use state voter registration portals to obtain information about their targets, instructing the agents — potentially in violation of state law — to pose as the voters to view their voter records. When agents raised concerns that using the state portals in that way could be illegal, they were told by superiors that they were “not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented,” according to the report.

“If this effort is truly legal, then why does DHS leadership have to promise its officers that they’re not going to be held liable? That says a lot,” Padilla said.

Officers have been given a quota to review at least 40 people per day, forcing them to confirm their identity, citizenship, and voting and registration record in a matter of minutes — a pace that compounds the risk that lawful voters will be investigated by mistake, the whistleblower complaint argued.

On Sunday, Senate Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, demanding he cease the operation. The use of the state portals was first reported by the New York Times in early September.

The allegations come amid a new surge of voter fraud investigations at DHS, which CNN first reported two weeks ago, as the department signals its role as a key driver of Trump’s election agenda.

The accuracy flaws in the federal citizenship records that agents are using for identifying potential non-citizen voters are well known and acknowledged even in the training materials, the whistleblower report alleges. But agents are nonetheless instructed to press on, even when key gaps in the data remain. At one point in a training video, the instructor says that key information in the record might be added later on, “through supplemental magic,” according to transcription excerpts of the training released with the report.

The whistleblower is being represented by Democracy Defenders, an organization that has opposed many Trump policies in court.

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CNN’s Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.