- Homeland Security Investigations — the ICE unit that normally chases drug cartels and human traffickers — is spending September and October combing through voter records in nine states, including California and Nevada, two states with sizable Latino electorates.
- State officials say the federal government skipped them entirely, and the flagship number behind the crackdown, a claimed 250,000 noncitizens registered across four states, has already fallen apart under scrutiny: in Nevada, a manual review confirmed only 185 of the nearly 16,000 people DHS first flagged.
- A federal judge ruled in June that the database powering these searches violates privacy law, and multiple investigations have found it disproportionately misidentifies naturalized citizens, including many Latino immigrants, as ineligible to vote.
Steve Hobbs learned his state had landed in the federal government's crosshairs the same way most Washingtonians did: by reading about it online. Washington's top election official says nobody at the Department of Homeland Security picked up the phone, sent an email, or gave his office any warning before adding the state to a roster of nine facing a new, intensive hunt for voter fraud.
Nine States, No Warning
Homeland Security Investigations — the branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement normally tasked with dismantling drug-trafficking networks, human-trafficking rings, and child-exploitation cases — has been ordered to spend early September through mid-October digging into the voting histories of people the government suspects may not be citizens. Internal guidance reviewed by CNN names nine target states: Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, and Connecticut. Two of them — California and Nevada — are home to some of the country's largest Latino voting blocs, with Latinos making up roughly a fifth of Nevada's electorate alone.
"Wasting Taxpayer Dollars"
In a written statement posted to his office's website, Hobbs said county election workers across Washington remain focused on running a clean vote, and that he learned of the sweep only through news coverage. He argued Homeland Security is "wasting taxpayer dollars investigating a phenomenon we know to be false," pointing to his own office's tally of just five confirmed voter-fraud cases statewide between 2008 and 2025 — a stretch in which roughly 90 million ballots were cast.
A DHS spokesperson pushed back on that framing, telling FOX 13 Seattle that Homeland Security Investigations is "actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found." The agency did not identify a single confirmed case of fraud involving a Washington voter, nor did it confirm the Washington investigation to the station directly.
A Number That Keeps Shrinking
The administration's public case for the crackdown leans heavily on SAVE, a decades-old citizenship-screening tool once used to confirm benefit eligibility one applicant at a time. A 2025 overhaul let officials run tens of millions of voter records through it in bulk. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who took over the agency from Kristi Noem this spring, stood before reporters in July and cited a fresh tally: more than 250,000 people he believed were noncitizens registered to vote across California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
That figure hasn't held up well. Internal records reviewed by CNN show that in Nevada alone, the nearly 16,000 flagged voters DHS touted publicly shrank to just 185 the agency could "confirm" through manual review when it met privately with state election officials in mid-August — a drop of more than 98 percent. Roughly 6,200 more were labeled only "higher confidence matches," with DHS itself conceding some could turn out to be naturalized citizens whose paperwork hadn't yet caught up in federal systems.
A separate, older figure often gets confused with this one: an April announcement that SAVE had flagged more than 24,000 potential noncitizens nationwide. That count predates, and is unrelated to, the four-state, 250,000-person figure Mullin cited months later — two different pools of people, even though the two numbers frequently appear side by side in coverage of the crackdown.
A Judge Already Called the Database Unlawful
Largely missing from the public debate is that a federal court has already weighed in on the tool generating these numbers. In June, a Washington, D.C. district judge ruled that the 2025 overhaul of SAVE broke federal privacy law by combining Americans' Social Security data with citizenship records in ways Congress never authorized. In a 75-page opinion, she warned that the system's errors put naturalized citizens at particular risk of having valid registrations wrongly canceled, writing that "the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens." Her ruling blocks the overhauled version of SAVE from being used to purge voters, though it leaves the older, narrower tool in place.
Naturalized Citizens Keep Getting Caught
Even before that ruling, reporting had already surfaced a pattern in SAVE's mistakes: people born abroad who later became U.S. citizens are disproportionately the ones getting flagged. A joint investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found that in one Texas county, at least 14 percent of the voters SAVE identified as possible noncitizens turned out to be citizens after all — and that the true error rate is likely higher, since not everyone had time to respond to verification notices before the deadline. One of those voters, born in Argentina and naturalized years earlier, had to track down her own citizenship paperwork after the system wrongly tagged her. "I'm here legally, and everything I've done has been per the law," she told reporters. A parallel review in a Missouri county found more than half the flagged voters there were, in fact, citizens — including a man who had registered to vote at his own naturalization ceremony.
That pattern matters directly for the current sweep: internal guidance tied to the investigation instructs agents to check whether people registered or cast a ballot while their citizenship applications were still pending, a category of scrutiny that lands disproportionately on immigrant communities, including the hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants who naturalize each year. Voting rights researchers at the Brennan Center make a broader point about this pattern: allegations of noncitizen voting that later collapse under review have a long track record of discouraging eligible minority voters from showing up at all, rather than exposing genuine fraud.
Big Dragnet, Few Prosecutions
Despite the scale of the federal effort, prosecutions haven't kept pace with the accusations. A ProPublica review of Justice Department case records spanning January 2025 to May 2026 found fewer than 150 referrals alleging noncitizen voting ever reached a prosecutor's desk, and only 41 resulted in actual charges. Officials have nonetheless pointed to individual arrests as proof the crackdown is working. Federal prosecutors touted one such case in late August, charging Darwin Jonathan Rivera Flores — a Honduran-born green card holder in his 30s living in California — with misrepresenting his citizenship status to register to vote.
Washington and Nevada Push Back
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat like Hobbs, questioned whether the inquiry was even legitimate, saying in a statement that the state's elections remain secure thanks to officials "across the ideological spectrum." Days later, the two Democrats issued joint guidance to election offices in every one of the state's 39 counties, laying out how local staff should respond if federal agents show up during the sweep.
In Nevada, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar told KOLO 8 News Now that his office "has not received any information regarding a new DHS/HSI investigation into Nevada," even though the state sits squarely on the federal target list — and even after DHS's own internal figures for Nevada collapsed under review weeks earlier.
What Happens Next
With ballots for the midterms already moving through some counties, Hobbs's office says its focus remains on the election in front of it, not on a federal request that arrived without warning and, so far, without evidence specific to Washington voters.
