Inside Trump's failed hunt for noncitizen voters

An unprecedented federal hunt for noncitizen voters has produced meager results, according to a ProPublica investigation. The Trump administration harnessed Homeland Security Investigations — a branch built to fight drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border crime — to search for evidence of illegal voting, dispatching agents to chase leads across the country.

The effort got off to a rocky start. The second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, Joe Teirab, told Washington that after subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, and he described the task force as ‘disjointed and disorganized’. Between January 2025 and May 2026, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution, and only 41 people were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes, according to ProPublica’s analysis of Justice Department data.

Career staff had warned that handing voter rolls to HSI could violate federal privacy laws and that its databases would produce inflated results. The administration pressed on anyway; the Department of Homeland Security released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states, without explaining how that figure was calculated. Administration officials insist the effort is producing meaningful results.