With the midterms approaching, the Trump Administration has ramped up its investigations into non-citizen voting around the U.S. But far from substantiating the President’s claims of widespread fraud, the results the effort is producing appear to underscore how vanishingly rare non-citizens registering or casting ballots is. In recent months, the Administration has doubled down on its push to access and review state voter rolls with the stated goal of cracking down on fraud and threatened to withhold funding or prosecute election officials if they don’t purge any improperly registered non-citizens.
In the lead-up to the November elections, the Administration has also reportedly diverted a number of federal personnel to an effort to scour voter rolls for non-citizens—an initiative a federal whistleblower has alleged may have involved methods that violate state laws. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official tells TIME that the department’s principal investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),“is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.” “We have repeatedly demonstrated that aliens can and do vote in our elections. Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders,” the official tells TIME, citing four past instances of non-citizen voting they said the government has identified.
We will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.” Yet while Trump and DHS have claimed that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are illegally registered to vote in states around the U.S., the number of people the Administration has so far charged in its efforts to crack down on such fraud are much smaller. Federal officials revealed in an update last week that DHS has pursued 1,600 voter fraud cases since January 2025, of which 160 have led to arrests. That arrest figure, which represents roughly 0.00009% of the roughly 174 million registered voters in the U.S., broadly aligns with the findings of previous research and state investigations that instances of non-citizen registration and voting are exceedingly rare.
Read More: Trump Keeps Railing Against Non-Citizen Voting. Research Shows It’s Extremely Rare In Nevada, meanwhile, state election officials said last week that after reviewing suspected non-citizens that DHS flagged on the state’s voter rolls, they had determined that every one of the voters was a U.S. citizen. Two months after Trump returned to office last year, he signed an Executive Order directing DHS to compare state voter rolls against federal databases to “identify unqualified voters” and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prioritize prosecuting non-citizen voting in conjunction with states.
To that end, the Trump Administration has demanded that states turn over their voter rolls and sued dozens for not complying, arguing that the federal government requires the rolls to verify their accuracy. Over the summer, the Administration also threatened to withhold federal homeland security funding from states if they did not adopt a series of changes to their elections, including phasing out specific electronic voting systems and running voter rolls through a DHS database. The Justice Department later in the summer sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning them that they could face criminal charges if they knowingly allowed non-citizens to stay on voter rolls.
Those moves have faced challenges in court. Of the more than 30 lawsuits the Administration has filed in an effort to gain access to state voter rolls, 25 have been dismissed. Several of the other cases are still pending, while the DOJ has appealed many of the decisions against it.
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