The Justice Department has struggled to meet White House demands to prosecute noncitizen voters as conspiracy theories that President Donald Trump and his allies have pushed in public fail to hold up legally.
The president has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of results, advisers said, leading to his public pronouncements about nationalizing elections and requiring voter ID, which he lacks the authority to do unilaterally.
Top Justice Department officials regularly meet with officials from Homeland Security Investigations — the law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security that works with prosecutors to bring cases against undocumented immigrants — about tracking down instances of voter fraud.
The meetings include at least one aide to Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of the president’s aggressive immigration policies, according to two people familiar with the matter who, like several others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. A White House official said the effort dates back to an executive order last year, and it’s standard to coordinate implementation involving multiple agencies.
This week, DHS instructed all HSI offices to review all open and closed voter fraud cases and report any individuals who registered to vote before they became naturalized U.S. citizens, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post. The Justice Department is preparing to give HSI officials access to voter registration data for suspected noncitizens, according to a Justice Department official familiar with the matter.
The officials have so far decided against DOJ providing all voter data to DHS because of concerns about generating bad publicity or being difficult to defend in court, the official familiar with the matter said. The information would come from state voter rolls, but many states have refused to give those to the Justice Department.
The efforts so far haven’t yielded results, in large part because the types of rampant voter fraud that the Trump administration describes have never been found. A Justice Department official said that it has brought significantly more voter-fraud cases than the Biden administration and that the law enforcement agency could bring more cases once it reviews the remaining voter rolls.
Last month, law enforcement officials closed an investigation into voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election in Nevada, which Trump lost by more than 33,000 votes. A Justice Department official familiar with the investigation said that FBI agents identified fewer than 40 potential instances of noncitizens voting. Prosecutors had previously decided not to proceed with cases against those people, likely because such cases are hard to win in court. The statute of limitations for any such prosecution stemming from the 2020 election has expired.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D) said the closure of the investigation without charges shows that Republicans’ focus on noncitizen voting is a “red herring” and “non-issue” that’s meant to dissuade Latinos and other voters from casting ballots.
“They’re trying to sow chaos into the process so it discourages people from participating,” he said.
White House officials defended the administration’s actions. “The only people who should be concerned by this are criminals,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
The most tangible outcome so far of Trump’s push to investigate the 2020 election has been the FBI’s seizure last month of ballots and voting records from Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous jurisdiction. The affidavit submitted to obtain the search warrant said the investigation originated with Kurt Olsen, a lawyer advising Trump who spoke with him multiple times on Jan. 6, 2021, and was later sanctioned in federal court for statements he made while challenging the 2022 election loss of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
The Fulton County affidavit showed that the Justice Department relied on claims that had been rejected in previous investigations and lawsuits, with no new evidence suggesting any conspiracies to undermine the election.
Soon after the Georgia raid, the FBI told state election officials across the country that it would hold a Feb. 25 conference call with them to talk about election security. Aguilar said he hadn’t decided whether he would participate in the call, which he said he views as a bullying tactic.
“This is just another avenue for them to say ‘we’re coming after you,’ ” he said.
Some Trump allies hailed the Fulton County affidavit as the FBI’s endorsement of their allegations of irregularities in the election.
“This is everything, folks,” former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said on his influential “War Room” talk show. “We gotta get to the railhead of the stolen election of 2020.”
More than five years later, Trump has not accepted his loss in 2020 and is still urging aides to find fraud and prosecute people. In the first months of his second term, he signed an executive order directing the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting noncitizens who illegally voted in American elections and to bring suits against states that thwart federal election laws. Attorney General Pam Bondi responded by suing two dozen states that refused to give up their voter rolls and installed people who have supported Trump’s false claims to the top ranks of the Justice Department.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which oversees voting cases, said on social media that officials have identified “thousands of non-citizens” in voter rolls.
Trump’s executive order also sought to require proof of citizenship to register to vote and to shorten mail-ballot deadlines. The order was blocked in court. The Constitution gives states the power to set election rules and grants Congress the ability to set national standards, but it gives the president no authority over elections.
As Trump continues demanding that Republicans “nationalize elections” and impose voter ID or ban voting machines by executive order, aides have said he means that he supports legislation that would require voters to show photo ID to cast ballots and provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. A bill to accomplish those goals, which Republicans in the House passed last week, could pose obstacles to voters who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or a passport that would prove they are citizens. The bill faces a difficult path in the Senate.
Only 46 percent of registered voters have an unexpired passport with their current legal name, according to the 2024 Survey of the Performance of American Elections. Nine percent of eligible voters do not have or do not have easy access to proof of citizenship, according to a survey by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland.
The current legislation is similar to a measure the House passed last year that has been stalled in the Senate. Supporters of the new bill hope to persuade Senate Republicans to change the filibuster rules to get it approved, an idea that the chamber’s Republican leaders have opposed.
Trump has made clear he is not content with pushing for legislation. In a pair of social media posts on Friday, the president said if Congress does not act, he would issue an executive order to try to require voters to show ID to cast ballots. Trump claimed he would soon present an “irrefutable” legal argument showing he has the power to impose such a requirement, even though legal scholars say he does not.
“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump wrote.
On Thursday, he elaborated: “If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is exploring legal options for a potential executive order on voter ID while pushing Congress to pass the bill. In recent weeks Cleta Mitchell, one of the lawyers who worked on Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 results, met with White House staff about policies on elections, people familiar with the meeting said. Mitchell declined to comment.
“You need an ID to go and purchase alcohol. You need an ID to go to the library and check out a book,” Leavitt said Wednesday. “And so the president thinks you should have an ID to vote in our nation’s elections.”
Sixty percent of Americans strongly favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID, and another 23 percent somewhat favor it, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center last August.
The Justice Department has sued two dozen states and Washington, D.C., to get their lists of registered voters that include names, addresses, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Federal judges have thrown out the lawsuits against California, Michigan and Oregon, saying the Justice Department had no right to the information. The other cases are pending.
The Justice Department says it wants the lists to make sure the states are properly maintaining them and removing ineligible voters, and it has been sharing voter data with the Department of Homeland Security. Courts have raised concerns that the administration is building a national database with voter information to help it enforce immigration laws.
On the day immigration agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month, Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) accusing him of lawlessness and attacking him for not assisting immigration authorities. She told him he could “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota” by turning over the state’s voter rolls and taking other actions.
Her request drew rebukes from Walz and other Democrats – as well as from the judge overseeing the voter rolls case in Oregon. In his decision throwing out that suit, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai wrote that Bondi’s letter “casts serious doubt” on what the administration plans to do with the voter lists.
The administration’s efforts, he wrote, “may very well lead to an erosion of voting rights and voter participation.”
The judge in the California case, David O. Carter, was similarly blunt, saying the administration’s plans “threaten the right to vote.” The decision in the Michigan case was more reserved but was notable because it was written by a Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Hala Y. Jarbou.
At least 11 states have provided the Justice Department with their full voter list or said they plan to do so, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) said turning over the lists was “extremely important” because doing so would help states identify noncitizens who have registered to vote. He has charged three noncitizens — including the longtime mayor of a small town — with illegally voting in recent months.
“I would not be concerned at all whether it’s a Republican or Democrat president asking for our voter rolls,” he said.
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