Fact Sheet: Trump’s Manufactured Noncitizen Voter Crisis Falls Apart

Donald Trump’s manufactured noncitizen voting crisis is falling apart at the seams. New reporting this week caught the Trump administration red-handed cooking the numbers behind the administration’s 250,000 noncitizen voters lie. First declaring the figure on July 16, Trump has used it to justify purging voters and hauling election officials into court. But according to Votebeat and Spotlight PA, DHS sent a letter to Pennsylvania earlier this month admitting its alleged 14,576 noncitizen voters figure came out of matching simple identifiers like names and phone numbers against immigration files — blowing up the administration’s prior claim that it used Social Security numbers in some matches to determine the totals.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has been called out for playing fast and loose with the numbers behind their noncitizen voter claims. In Nevada, a DHS fraud official was caught admitting that DHS’s figure was merely a “ceiling,” and the department had never “had a full manual review” of its list. In Texas, the state determined that hundreds of voters flagged by the federal database were actually eligible citizens. And the same DHS unit in charge of the effort now sits at the center of a whistleblower disclosure describing an “Unlawful Voter Initiative” run through immigration officers pulled off national security casework, a single training video, and a daily name quota. Yet the federal government’s hunt continues. Here’s what the record really shows on the Trumped-up noncitizen voting numbers:

TRUMP’S NONCITIZEN VOTER FIGURE REMAINS UNCONFIRMED

Trump Announced A Figure His Own Department Could Not Confirm. In his July 16 primetime address, Donald Trump said a DHS review had “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin put the four-state version in front of cameras the next morning: “We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” he said, adding that what he loves about numbers is that “they don’t lie.” The letters DHS actually sent those states said only that there “may be as many as” 190,832 noncitizens in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.

• DHS Claimed Real Matches For Fewer Than Half The People Inside Its Own Total. The four letters account for 118,003 matches out of 256,463 flagged registrants, neither Trump nor DHS has claimed that any of those people actually voted, and all four states had already gone to court to keep it from taking the unredacted voter data it would need to identify anyone.

PENNSYLVANIA: DHS CAUGHT LYING ABOUT NONCITIZEN VOTER FIGURES

DHS Told Pennsylvania It Had Used Social Security Numbers In Some Matches. Now, It Says It Never Did. The July 16 letter put 14,576 potential noncitizens on the state’s rolls and said Social Security numbers were used in some of the matches, though Pennsylvania has never given the federal government a voter file that contains them. In a Sept. 9 letter, DHS dropped that claim without explanation, saying the match ran on first names, last names, dates of birth, phone numbers, and addresses, while treating a record missing a phone number or address as “a lower confidence match but likely still the same individual,” and admitting other indicators such as previous addresses or spousal information may have been used where those criteria did not line up.

• DHS Called Pennsylvania’s Republican Election Chief a Liar, Yet Still Has Not Produced the Requested Voter List. Before this month’s DHS letter, Pennsylvania’s Republican election chief Al Schmidt sent a letter to Trump’s DHS Secretary, writing that DHS representatives had told his office they “did not have high confidence” the 14,576 people were noncitizens. DHS now calls that account a “blatant mischaracterization.” DHS also said it would send a full list, demanding that each of the 14,576 people “should be carefully reviewed by your state” — but as of this week’s reporting, there was no confirmation it had been sent. Mullin has already warned that officials who refused to cooperate could be “held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even depending on how far it goes, prison time.”

NEVADA: DHS FRAUD OFFICIALS ALREADY ADMITTED FIGURES WERE NOT FULLY REVIEWED

Nevada Officials Recorded DHS Conceding That Its Number Had Not Been Manually Reviewed — and Was a Ceiling, Not a Final Finding. On an Aug. 13 call, DHS fraud official Kimberley Vogt acknowledged that the 15,903 names Mullin gave the state never “had a full manual review of each one” and that the figure “would be the ceiling,” with just 185 confirmed as noncitizens and more than 14,000 cases unresolved.

DHS: Even the Names In Nevada Labeled Higher Confidence Could Belong to Naturalized Citizens. The department further acknowledged that some of its 6,200 higher confidence matches could be citizens whose immigration records were never updated, refused to tell Nevada which data points it had matched, and offered a “75% confidence” list if the state would move faster. It asked Nevada to investigate and remove anyone found ineligible anyway, and the state’s office has received seven voter-related subpoenas from the Trump DOJ over the past three months.

TEXAS

Texas Cooperated, and Hundreds of Flagged Voters Turned Out To Be U.S. Citizens. The state ran its roll of more than 18 million voters through the federal SAVE database and announced in October 2025 that it had found 2,724 potential noncitizens, and counties were told to cancel any flagged registration not backed by proof of citizenship within 30 days. But Texas confirmed on Tuesday that 578 of those flagged voters are U.S. citizens, 506 of them only because their passport information reached the federal database after the state ran its check, and county registrars were told to reinstate any of those registrations that had already been cancelled. State and federal officials announced charges against seven people in Tarrant County the same day, out of more than 18 million registered Texans.

The Republican State Official Who Ran the Check Warned DHS About the Data, But Got No Answer. The Texas Secretary of State wrote USCIS in April that county registrars were collecting citizenship documents from voters the system had flagged, and her office had heard nothing back as of July, by which point a federal judge had found that states using the database “are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

THE WHISTLEBLOWER

Whistleblower: DHS Put Hundreds Of Officers On A Voter Hunt With One Video And A Daily Quota. A whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Alex Padilla says officers in the same USCIS unit that produced the Pennsylvania numbers were pulled off immigration fraud and national security work on Aug. 21, sat through a single one-hour-45-minute training video, and by Aug. 25 were reviewing 40 people a day, roughly 12 minutes each, with orders to finish by Sept. 12.

Officers Were Told To Misrepresent Themselves To Get Voter Records, Then To File Reports They Believed Were Wrong. The disclosure says they were directed to attest falsely on state voter websites that they were the voter or had the voter’s permission, and that when they questioned the legality of it, leadership told them to proceed and assured them they would not be “personally liable.” Training materials acknowledged that “there will be U.S. citizens in this population” and that missing information would be filled in “through supplemental magic,” yet officers were told to create federal law enforcement records against people tagged as unlawful voters even when they believed the data was wrong.

The Trump DOJ Then Told A Federal Judge That DHS Had Switched Its Social Security Data Link Back On. In a court filing the same day the disclosure went public, the department said DHS had “reactivated” the link and used the data to help determine whether illegal voting “may have occurred.” Schumer and Padilla gave Mullin until Monday to answer for the program.

WHAT COMES NEXT

ICE Agents Are Working Voter Cases In Nine States, Including Pennsylvania And Nevada. Homeland Security Investigations, the division that normally handles trafficking and smuggling, opened a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative” on Sept. 1 that runs through mid-October.

DHS Says The Law Protecting Voters From Last-Minute Purges Does Not Apply To It. The department told Nevada that the federal 90-day quiet period “does not apply” because Washington did the systematic matching before handing names to the states, the same theory the Trump DOJ is advancing in court.

They Have Said Out Loud That They Intend To Keep Going. Mullin promised in July that DHS would keep releasing analyses like these during early voting and while ballots are counted, the DOJ is asking the Supreme Court to revive the citizenship database a federal judge struck down in June, after the D.C. Circuit refused to put that ruling on hold, and Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that the Court’s mail ballot ruling “doesn’t affect ongoing criminal investigations into illegal voting.”