DHS Launches Coordinated Voter-Fraud Surge in Nine States Starting Today

Homeland Security Investigations began a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge” Tuesday in nine states under internal guidance reviewed by CNN, with field work scheduled from early September through mid-October. The offices named are Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, and Connecticut. The guidance directs agents to pursue investigative leads, conduct field interviews, and support timely prosecutorial review. HSI is the ICE component that ordinarily handles human trafficking, drug smuggling, and child exploitation. Secretary Markwayne Mullin has used the agency as the investigative arm of the administration’s election-integrity push, including requests for state voter rolls and warnings that Homeland Security grant money can be held back from states that refuse audits or other reforms.

The timing lands as midterm voting approaches. Longstanding Justice Department practice has discouraged overt investigative steps that could be seen as influencing an election already underway. CNN noted that the guidance’s reference to field interviews and prosecutorial support is therefore unusual this close to November. The surge follows months of DHS claims that public voter files in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania contained more than 250,000 noncitizens—figures Mullin cited in July as 190,832 in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Those four states had declined to run rolls through the federal SAVE citizenship-check system, prompting DHS to say it used publicly available records instead. State officials in California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania asked DHS for the underlying matches. In a mid-August meeting with Nevada election officials, DHS said it had manually confirmed 185 noncitizen registrants in that state and described the original 15,903 as a “ceiling,” with thousands of names still under review. Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, wrote that DHS later told the state it did not have high confidence the 14,576 names were all noncitizens improperly registered. New Jersey separately reported that an MVC data error under the prior administration put about 6,600 self-identified noncitizens on the rolls, of whom roughly 340 later voted; more than 5,100 names have been removed.

HSI has already been working individual cases. On Aug. 19 the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts charged Chinese national Yupeng Sun with fraudulent registration and fraudulent voting after an HSI investigation found he impersonated a lawful permanent resident, registered online in October 2024, and cast an early ballot in the presidential election. Mullin said only citizens should elect American leaders. A ProPublica review of Justice Department data found fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen-voter matters referred for prosecution between January 2025 and May 2026, with 41 people charged in that window. Federal law already makes noncitizen registration and voting a crime. The new guidance does not itself change that law. It concentrates HSI offices in the nine listed states on leads already in the pipeline and on interviews meant to move cases to prosecutors before mid-October. DHS has said HSI is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found” and that the department has “repeatedly demonstrated that illegal aliens can and do vote.” States that have asked for the raw match lists say they still lack enough detail to cancel registrations without risking eligible citizens. The surge will test whether field interviews convert the larger published totals into charges before ballots go out.