Securing America's Promise: How Election Conspiracies Are Reshaping Homeland Security

This original commentary by RCP Partner Jason Houser originally appeared on the Securing America’s Promise substack on July 20, 2026.

How Election Conspiracies Are Reshaping Homeland Security

HSI Should Be Investigating Cartels, Child Predators, and Human Traffickers, Not Chasing Debunked Election Conspiracies

Homeland Security Investigations is the main investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. It is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and employs more than 10,400 people, including roughly 7,100 special agents and 800 criminal analysts. The agency’s broad mission, encompassing narcotics trafficking, child exploitation, human trafficking, money laundering, export-control violations, cyber-enabled crime, and threats to national security.Over the course of my career, I have worked across national security and law enforcement in a number of roles — at DHS as a counterterrorism adviser, with CBP from 2009 to 2016, as a Navy intelligence officer in Afghanistan, through work connected to U.S. Cyber Command, and later as ICE chief of staff from 2021 to 2023.During that time, I helped oversee an agency whose most critical investigative work was focused on the threats Americans expect federal law enforcement to confront: drug trafficking networks, child exploitation, human trafficking and smuggling, illicit finance, export-control violations, cyber-enabled crime, and national security threats.Auditing voter rolls was never part of that mission. Yet HSI is now reportedly being asked to take on a politically contentious task that has traditionally been handled by other federal agencies.President Trump’s recent election-security speech makes this issue more urgent. By elevating claims of noncitizen voting, foreign interference, and alleged voter-roll vulnerabilities from the White House, he is putting the full weight of the presidency behind a narrative that has repeatedly outpaced the evidence. The President made several claims in the speech—including mass noncitizen voting and foreign manipulation claims—that have been contradicted by prior reviews or lack clear support. Most notably, he bombastically claimed that these election claims were an immediate national security concern.Once these claims become presidential priorities, agencies like HSI come under pressure to pursue them, even when the investigative basis is thin. The question is not simply about election rhetoric. It is whether one of the nation’s most important transnational crime agencies is being diverted from investigating cartels, child exploitation, human trafficking, illicit finance, cybercrime, and national security threats.In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing DHS, in coordination with the Department of Government Efficiency, to compare state voter registration lists with federal immigration databases. States have since run more than 60 million voter records — roughly a third of all registered voters in America — through that system. It has flagged an alleged 250,000 people as potential noncitizens, and DHS passed the names to HSI for investigation.The agency’s mandate expanded again in February 2026, when an internal memo instructed its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit to review every voter-fraud case in the country, open or closed, and flag anyone who registered or cast a ballot before completing naturalization. HSI agents have since requested voter files from election officials in Webb County, Texas, and Forsyth County, North Carolina, and have been drawn into a broader inquiry involving Arizona’s 2020 election.And now, this past week, DHS escalated this effort again, warning Secretaries of State about alleged noncitizens on voter rolls and citing preliminary reviews in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. That kind of broad federal demand will land on HSI agents and analysts, who will be expected to chase uncertain database matches, request records, conduct interviews, and build cases — all while already being pulled away from child exploitation, fentanyl, trafficking, illicit finance, and national security investigationsIt is, in effect, a new, narrowed mission for an agency built for very different work — one that officials say has been layered on without relieving the agency of any of its other duties.To be clear, this is not an argument against investigating election crime. Ballot fraud, voter intimidation, campaign finance violations, and foreign interference are real threats that can erode trust in democracy. But they already have established investigative channels: the FBI, U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, its Election Crimes Branch, and its Civil Rights Division, which handles voter-suppression matters. Proper resource allocation ensures agencies can effectively address the most pressing issues and uphold public confidence.

A Pattern Bigger Than Election Cases

Since January 2025, the administration has diverted more than 25,000 federal law enforcement personnel — and, by some estimates, nearly 33,000 — away from their normal duties to support immigration enforcement, according to a Cato Institute analysis.Nearly a quarter of FBI agents nationwide, and up to 40 percent in the largest field offices, have been reassigned to support ICE. More than 1,700 Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation agents and staff — up from 250 a year earlier — have been detailed to ICE.The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes public corruption, has shrunk from 36 career prosecutors to two. HSI itself, according to that same Cato analysis, has reassigned roughly 90 percent of its workforce to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. Even a small shift in resources can have significant consequences. Diverting 10 percent of HSI’s investigative workforce would amount to more than 1.6 million investigative hours. A 20 percent diversion would exceed 3.2 million. If the Cato Institute’s estimate is even roughly accurate, HSI is operating with only a fraction of the investigative capacity for which Congress has funded and staffed the agency.That is why mission focus matters. Diverting resources and personnel can mean the difference between a fentanyl network mapped and one that keeps moving product, a trafficking victim identified and one who stays missing, a child-exploitation tip worked and one that sits in a queue.

The “Nonvoter” Hunt: What It Has Actually Found

Of the roughly 24,000 SAVE referrals sent to HSI, the Justice Department has been pressing prosecutors to prioritize about 90 open investigations. Even that number likely overstates the real caseload. For example, when Idaho ran its own voter rolls through the same federal database, the system flagged 760 potential noncitizens out of more than a million registered voters; after election officials reviewed each flag by hand, only about a dozen held up as worth referring to federal investigators. Applying similar error rates nationwide highlights the limited effectiveness of current efforts and underscores the need for more accurate, targeted approaches.So far, the campaign has resulted in a handful of prosecutions. Even the Heritage Foundation — a key author of Project 2025 and an organization with every institutional incentive to find more, not fewer — could document only 25 prosecutions nationwide in which citizenship was the disputed issue in a voter-fraud case.Those cases span a range of jurisdictions. The DOJ charged four more noncitizens with illegal voting in January. In New Orleans, HSI agents arrested a green-card holder on July 1, days after a federal grand jury indicted him on four counts for voting in two federal elections. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged four residents with illegal voting and false naturalization statements, and Kansas prosecutors have charged three noncitizens this year, including a sitting mayor.The broader historical record tells a similar story. The Brennan Center found 30 instances of noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast in 2016. Heritage’s own database found 24 instances of noncitizen voting nationwide between 2003 and 2023 —even with a federal dragnet in place since last spring. The Cato Institute concluded separately that state reviews have found noncitizen voting to be virtually nonexistent.When CNN’s Kasie Hunt asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the 25-case number in June, he did not dispute it. “Well, 25 is too many,” he said, adding, “One person voting illegally is one too many. We shouldn’t have to worry about even one.” That may be a defensible standard for a lawmaker to hold. But it is not, by itself, a justification for assigning a transnational crime agency to police a category of conduct this rare. At the same time, HSI remains understaffed and responsible for a caseload that included 32,608 criminal arrests and the identification of 1,783 child-exploitation victims in fiscal year 2024.

Why These Cases Take Months, Sometimes Years

The gap between 24,000 flagged records and roughly two dozen prosecutions warrants explanation. The reason says less about this investigation than it does about the realities of criminal investigations generally. Certified voter-registration files, naturalization records, and immigration A-files are held by county election offices, state agencies, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — three systems that do not share data in real time. When a county pushes back on a records request, as several already have, that alone can add months.Almost every statute in play — voting by a noncitizen or making a false statement on a naturalization form — requires prosecutors to prove that the person acted knowingly. Someone who was mistakenly registered at the DMV, or who cast one ballot before realizing their citizenship had not yet been finalized, has not committed the crime these laws were written to reach, even if their name sits on a list of “potential noncitizens.” Proving intent means reconstructing what a person understood about their own status months or years after the fact — interviews, paper trails, sometimes conflicting records.Because election cases carry a unique risk of appearing partisan, the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch and Public Integrity Section are supposed to weigh in before charges are filed — a safeguard designed to keep prosecutions from becoming political tools. That process is slow by design. It is also exactly why 24,000 referrals shrink to 90 open investigations, and 90 open investigations shrink again to only a handful of actual prosecutions.

What’s at Stake This November

The absence of widespread prosecutions does not mean the campaign has been without consequences. The 2026 midterms will take place on November 3, and the effect of 24,000 flags and a stack of federal letters is not measured only in convictions.Election officials in both parties describe the pressure as draining. David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, put it simply: “It’s not a threat to the public servants who run elections, but it is exhausting.” Time spent answering federal inquiries is time not spent on ballot logistics, poll-worker training, and cybersecurity ahead of Election Day.Researchers who study voter fraud describe something more pointed. In Votebeat, Rutgers political scientist Lorraine Minnite called the scale of the effort “such overkill that you have to believe that they are trying to create a spectacle to intimidate people and go on a fishing expedition using bad data.” UCLA election-law professor Rick Hasen said the pattern fits “the Trump Administration’s efforts to push the myth of mass noncitizen voting and to threaten and intimidate state and local election officials,” adding that they “will try every lever and threat to keep this issue in the news.”The people most likely to feel that pressure are the naturalized citizens who voted lawfully and now wonder whether their names are among the 24,000, and the eligible voters in mixed-status households who decide that staying home is safer than risking a knock at the door from a federal agent. The risk heading into November is not that noncitizens will swing a close race, which the evidence says is not happening, but that a federal dragnet built on a 0.04 percent hit rate intimidates and talks legal voters out of showing up.

What Happens Next — And What Would Actually Safeguard Elections

Three things are worth watching between now and Election Day.First, the court fights. Parts of the order that created the SAVE referral pipeline in the first place have been under an injunction since April 2025, when a D.C. district court paused key provisions, and since June 2025, when a Massachusetts court blocked additional provisions. Two additional rulings landed within 24 hours of each other in late June 2026: one blocked a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration, and the other halted a separate 2026 order that would have created a federal voter list and restricted mail ballots, with the judge finding it “unconstitutionally violate[s] the separation of powers.” Separately, the DOJ has sued more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., demanding unredacted voter-roll data, and has not won a single one of those cases — losing at least 15 district court cases and its first appeal. It remains to be seen whether that losing streak holds through the fall.Second, whether HSI’s case reviews start producing real charges as the midterms approach, or whether the pipeline keeps shrinking the closer it gets to actual evidence. That will say more about whether this is law enforcement or political theater.Then there are the letters sent on July 7, 2026. That day, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sent identical letters to election officials in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., warning that officers who “knowingly retain noncitizens” on their rolls could face criminal liability, and gave each state five days to explain its compliance procedures. Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, and others pushed back immediately, saying their existing processes already satisfy federal law.As Becker put it: “If you really thought they committed a crime, you wouldn’t be sending them a letter. You’d be bringing criminal indictments.” The test will be whether any of those 50 letters produce actual cases — or whether the five-day deadline passes with little more than paperwork exchanged.What would actually protect the vote is the standard every serious law enforcement agency is supposed to follow: a real investigative predicate, not a recycled 2020 talking point; resources allocated in proportion to the threat, so a handful of voter-file inquiries doesn’t outrank fentanyl and child-exploitation cases; and insulation from partisan command, so election matters move through the Election Crimes Branch and Public Integrity Section rather than a White House-driven memo.Congress has a responsibility to examine how those 25,000-plus diverted agents are being used. Oversight hearings could provide a public accounting and replace competing estimates with facts. Voters, too, should understand the legal landscape: noncitizen voting is already a crime with serious consequences, including possible deportation, and eligible voters should not abandon their right to cast a ballot because of confusion or fear created by a federal notice.

The Bottom Line

Election integrity matters. It is not strengthened by turning a transnational-crime agency into a nationwide voter-roll audit. Election security is strengthened by state and local election officials doing their jobs, by CISA helping secure infrastructure, by the FBI and DOJ investigating real federal crimes through the channels built for exactly that purpose, by courts enforcing the Constitution—and by federal agencies staying in the lane they were built for.Every hour an HSI agent spends chasing a 0.04 percent hit rate is an hour not spent protecting a child, disrupting a fentanyl network, identifying a trafficking victim, or dismantling a criminal organization. That makes Americans less safe. And from a law enforcement perspective, that is the clearest test there is.