Homeland security officials, at the direction of the White House, are intensifying efforts to investigate voting by noncitizens in pursuit of President Trump’s baseless claims that illegal voting by undocumented immigrants is a rampant and insidious threat.
Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently issued a two-page memo requiring its employees to “review all open and closed voter fraud cases” involving immigrants who registered to vote, or actually voted, before they became naturalized U.S. citizens.
The memo, obtained by The New York Times, is part of an extraordinary all-fronts effort to insert federal law enforcement into the machinery of American elections ahead of the midterms. It is consistent with instructions the administration has issued to some U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country in recent weeks.
The new initiative “reflects the administration’s commitment to safeguarding democratic processes and maintaining public confidence in the electoral system,” the memo stated.
The nationwide effort to find and charge criminal voting cases is meant to target all noncitizen voters, but could have a particularly negative effect on current and former green card holders. While in the country legally, green card holders are not U.S. citizens and therefore may not vote legally in federal, state and most local elections — but might be unaware of these distinctions.
Such confusion is hardly unheard-of: It appeared to have been the cause of a small town mayor’s recent arrest on charges of voting illegally by the state authorities in Kansas.
The push comes as an analysis of immigrant voting, commissioned by the Trump administration, has provided no evidence of widespread or even significant voter fraud, according to interviews with government officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Officials referred about 10,000 of 49.5 million voter registrations to Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation.
That was roughly 0.02 percent of the names processed.
The Justice Department and Homeland Security Department declined to comment.
Mr. 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 noncitizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“Noncitizens voting is a crime,” she added. “Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
Administration officials have pointed to an array of arrests and actions to justify cracking down on illegal voting, despite the lack of evidence that scattered irregularities and relatively rare instances of fraud have made a significant difference in recent elections.
Instead, they have presented as a major accomplishment the removal of dead voters from state rolls. They have also publicized the discovery of noncitizens, typically no more than a few hundred to about a thousand, who were registered illegally in Louisiana, Ohio and Texas and subsequently purged from the rolls.
A small percentage of those instances have resulted in actual prosecutions, however, and many of those cases have involved immigrants charged with more serious criminal offenses, including illegal gun possession.
The directive for H.S.I. agents appears aimed at trying to determine if immigrants who became naturalized may have voted illegally before they gained citizenship. If so, the directive envisions not just charging them with certain crimes and misdemeanors, but might also strip them of their citizenship and deport them.
The administration’s efforts are not limited to cases related to immigration, but also those involving discredited conspiracy theories involving the foreign manipulation of voting machines and other claims of vote-fixing that served as the justification for the F.B.I.’s seizure near Atlanta last month of ballots from the 2020 election.
An emerging focus of the administration’s effort is to scour voter rolls in populous conservative states, like Florida and Texas, whose state governments are working closely with the Trump administration. States controlled by Democrats have resisted efforts to give the administration access to such data.
Both the H.S.I. memo and instructions given to career prosecutors cite Mr. Trump’s executive order on election security to provide a legal basis for their actions.
The overall effort to enlist federal law enforcement in elections is being coordinated, at least in part, by Anthony Salisbury, a top deputy to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s domestic policy adviser and the architect of the administration’s increasingly hard-line immigration crackdown.
In recent weeks, Mr. Salisbury, himself a former H.S.I. agent, has overseen a working group on election fraud. It includes three aides to the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche: Colin McDonald, Nick Davis and Vetan Kapoor; a top H.S.I. official, John Condon; representatives from the National Security Council and other White House aides, according to a person familiar with the group who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
It is not clear what directives the group has issued. But the effort is decidedly top-down.
In some instances, career prosecutors, typically given broad investigative discretion, have been ordered to provide their Trump-appointed superiors detailed justification if they choose not to bring voting fraud prosecutions that are flagged as potentially promising, according to officials who requested anonymity to avoid retribution.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida, a jurisdiction with a large immigrant population and a state government friendly to the Trump administration, recently received such a directive, according to a person familiar with the matter.
It was highly unusual in demanding that any decision to decline to pursue an immigration-related case needed to be reviewed by the U.S. attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, and his chief deputy, the person said.
The increasing involvement of H.S.I., an agency responsible for immigration enforcement, in elections has raised alarm among voting rights groups that believe it is part of a campaign to intimidate legal voting by immigrants.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, stoked those concerns when she recently said her goal in cracking down on voter fraud was to “make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”
Mr. Trump, who has promoted a variety of discredited conspiracies, has said he wants to “nationalize” the elections, even though the Constitution explicitly gives the authority to administer elections to the states.
He has also said that if the Republican-controlled Congress does not pass a new law imposing strict identification requirements to vote, he will seek to do so by presidential decree. That bill would require proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to vote. Roughly half of Americans have a passport.
The bill would also impose criminal penalties on any election official who registers a person to vote without knowing if they are U.S. citizens — even if they are U.S. citizens.
The Trump administration has made denaturalization a priority for the Department of Homeland Security.
Late last year, The Times reported that the agency was seeking 100 to 200 denaturalization cases a month from immigration officers across the country. Administration officials have said the effort is meant to root out those who fraudulently or wrongfully received their citizenship, while advocates for immigrants see it as a way to further curtail people’s legal immigration pathways.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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