Whistleblower says DHS told hundreds of officers to lie to search state voter rolls

The report. A protected whistleblower report released Monday, Sept. 14, by Chuck Schumer (Sen-D New York) and Alex Padilla (Sen-D California) says DHS fraud officers hunting noncitizen voting under the 'Unlawful Voter Initiative' were ordered to search state portals that require the user to swear he is the voter. The officers work in the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, the DHS unit that screens immigration files for fraud. The warning. In Virginia and Florida they clicked past a warning that opening another voter's record is punishable as computer fraud. Agency lawyers told them they would not be personally liable. The training. Officers got under two hours of training video and 12 minutes to verify each person's citizenship before entering it in a law-enforcement record. They also warned the voter data was unreliable. The effort has turned up a handful of cases so far.

What the Unlawful Voter Initiative does, and the deadline senators set:

• Tens of thousands of people are under investigation after officers were pulled off regular immigration and security caseloads in late August
• In California officers often could not load the state voter site and were told to create TECS records anyway — TECS is the DHS enforcement database — and the report warns the files rest on unchecked data
• Schumer and Padilla gave DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow until Sept. 21, 2026 to halt the program, purge the records and answer questions