At a September 14 press conference, Senators Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unveiled a whistleblower report alleging the Trump administration deployed hundreds of federal agents to violate state laws in an effort to access sensitive voter data.
The effort, part of Trump’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” marks a major escalation in the president’s attempt to undermine the November midterms by claiming widespread fraud.
“They were directed to stop their national security screenings,” said Padilla referring to agents with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), “to find or manufacture evidence for the president’s conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud.”
The report claims USCIS agents were directed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to misrepresent themselves with the aim of accessing sensitive voter information. Agents were also allegedly told to “falsely flag naturalized citizens as ineligible voters in federal law enforcement records.”
Senator Padilla committed himself to “doing everything possible” to stop the effort.
The Unlawful Voter Initiative
The DHS/USCIS Unlawful Voter Initiative was initiated on August 25, a week after DHS recanted its announcement that it had identified 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in 4 targeted states — a figure that would imply about 1.4 million illegal voter registrations nationwide.
The initiative also seems to have begun after Census Bureau leadership published a clumsy pseudo-analysis of 2020 election data that was widely criticized by experts who claimed the bureau lacked access to the data behind the claim.
Details of the whistleblower report come as polls show a potential blue wave in November, and on the same day the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempts to curtail mail in voting.
The administration now appears determined to manufacture “evidence” of voter fraud to dramatically improve its electoral chances by disenfranchising millions of U.S. voters with a special emphasis on naturalized citizens.
A solution in search of a problem
At the heart of that effort is the SAVE database initiative (not to be confused with the president’s stalled SAVE America Act legislation).
The initiative seeks to expand use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. Initially designed to allow employers to verify that job applicants are legally authorized to work in the country, the administration is seeking to use it to vet voter rolls on the baseless argument of widespread fraud.
According to the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation — behind the infamous Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term — just “0.000008 percent of more than 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections” between 1982 and 2025 were from non-citizens.
Meanwhile, multiple analyses have shown the president’s voter suppression efforts threaten to strip as much as 12% of American voters — around 30 million people — of their right to vote.
But, as Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, writes, pointing this out will do little to deter an administration for whom “mass disenfranchisement is the goal.”
A flawed system
The administration has long been investing in deploying the SAVE system as a basis to prune voter registration rolls.
In September 2025, the League of Women Voters sued DHS to block such use of the system. On September 5 of this year, the DC Circuit Court upheld a June District Court order in their favor. In response, Trump’s Department of Justice filed an “emergency” appeal to the Supreme Court on September 7.
For the moment, use of SAVE is still blocked — but if the Supreme Court approves the administration’s application for a stay of the DC Court order it could be resumed, with dangerous implications.
Targeting naturalized citizens
SAVE relies on the Social Security Administration’s Master File of Social Security Numbers — referred to as Numident — to determine if a voter is a citizen or not.
But Numident is not automatically updated by USCIS about immigrants who are naturalized. Both newly naturalized citizens and their children have to reach out on their own to ask the Social Security Administration to update their Social Security card in order to be re-coded in the SSA database as citizens.
Oftentimes this does not happen, for a variety of reasons, including costly administrative fees or simple ignorance of this requirement.
If the SAVE system were deployed to vet voter rolls, these individuals — there are some 26 million naturalized citizens now living in the US, with some fraction of them having failed to update their Social Security information — would be flagged as illegal non-citizen registrants.
They would be denied the right to vote, and quite possibly arrested and detained as alleged non-citizens.
‘Cheat like hell’
During the Republican’s mid-term “convention” in Dallas last week, President Trump exhorted the audience to “cheat like hell” in the mid-term elections.
Sadly, given the recent whistleblower report and his administration’s long record of playing fast and loose with long established democratic norms and procedures, it appears that Trump and his politically commandeered federal agencies are leading the way.
EDWARD KISSAM
Edward Kissam is a trustee of the Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund, which focuses on sound immigration policy reform and civic integration of immigrants. He has conducted and published research on migrant and seasonal farmworkers and immigrant integration in the U.S., as well as educational initatives in Afghanistan. Edward has worked on issues of differential census undercount for three decades and published papers on farmworker undercount and coverage measurement in the 1990, 2000, and 2010 decennial censuses.
