Sept. 14 (UPI) -- Federal immigration investigators may have violated state laws while carrying out a Trump administration effort to identify alleged unlawful voters, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Monday.
The anonymous whistleblower is a client of the Democracy Defenders Fund, which last week submitted a disclosure to Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., alleging that investigators are being directed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to misrepresent themselves as registered voters to access state voter records using sensitive personal information obtained from Department of Homeland Security data.
According to the 40-page whistleblower disclosure Padilla made public Monday, investigators may have already committed thousands of violations of state laws in this effort to obtain the voter records, which they then compare with USCIS records to determine whether the person is a U.S. citizen and whether they may have lawfully registered to vote or cast a ballot.
The voter information is allegedly being unlawfully accessed by investigators who are required to review at least 40 people a day, according to the whistleblower disclosure. It states that this quota gives an investigator only 12 minutes to determine if a subject is a U.S. citizen, whether they are an unlawful voter and, if so, to create a federal law enforcement record that the whistleblower warns may be based on unreliable data.
"If unreliable DHS data is used to generate purported evidence of 'unlawful voters,' that could disenfranchise eligible voters or disrupt state and local election administration," Padilla and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a joint statement.
The disclosure comes less than two months before November's midterm elections, which President Donald Trump has been increasingly focused on, having warned Republicans that if they lose the House he could face impeachment. Trump, who falsely maintains that he won the 2020 election, has repeatedly expressed concerns over election integrity since returning to the White House and has advanced efforts under this framing that Democrats and democracy and civil rights advocates describe as voter-disenfranchising efforts, including the administration's unsuccessful attempt to compel states to hand over their citizens' voter data.
Last month, The New York Times reported that hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents were being surged to a task force directed to find noncitizens who are registered to vote, despite a lack of evidence that there is an issue with voter fraud. The whistleblower disclosure states that on Aug. 21, hundreds of USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate personnel were instructed to stop what they were doing and watch a training video on how to access the sensitive voter information. On Aug. 25, these investigators began the federal hunt for unlawful voters.
Padilla and Schumer say that this rushed surge appears to be an effort to manufacture evidence to support Trump's unfounded claims of widespread noncitizen voting fraud. The Democratic pair allege that DHS is using federal law enforcement resources to circumvent judicial rulings blocking the Trump administration from seizing states' voter data to gather that information anyway.
During a Capitol Hill press conference on Monday, Padilla said information they are seeking includes registration status, political party, voting history and other data that Trump has tried to get since 2017.
Trump's efforts through the Justice Department to force states to hand over their voting records have been ruled against by the courts more than 30 times, he said.
"But when the front door is locked, Trump tries to break in the back door, and now he has USCIS officers combining the data that they are getting with other DHS data that they recognize and they admit is unreliable," he said.
"They are doing this to build cases against individuals at the rate of five cases per hour. That's their charge. That's their quota."
He said they are combining unreliable data with data illegally obtained to manufacture allegations that misidentify people as unlawful voters.
Schumer described the so-called unlawful voter initiative as "nothing more than an unlawful order by the government to silence the voices of Americans."
"The Department of Homeland Security is sending hundreds of officers who should be focused on our security on a wild goose chase to prove Trump's long-debunked election conspiracy theories -- and DHS is telling officers to lie to do it," he said in a statement.
According to the disclosure, the investigators are being directed by DHS and USCIS leadership to break state laws where applicable by making false claims using personally identifiable information from DHS data on stat governments websites and claiming that they are the voter or have been authorized by the voter to obtain the desired voter information.
Some states, including Virginia, include a specific requirement of proof that one is authorized to access the voter's information under penalty of law. Using the personally identifiable information on the state government websites to prove the investigators are either the voter or authorized to access the voter's data "appears to be a clear-cut violation of state laws regarding access to individual voter information and raises serious questions about federal privacy laws and data policies as well," Padilla and Schumer said in a report on the disclosure.
The pair are calling on DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow to respond to a series of questions raised by the whistleblower disclosure no later than Sept. 21, while directing them to stop the initiative and remove any records generated by it.
UPI has contacted DHS and USCIS for comment.
"If these reports are true, this is not merely alarming. It is a five-alarm fire for American democracy," League of Women Voters of the United States CEO Celina Stewart said in a statement.
"Allegations that federal workers were pressured to fabricate evidence and falsely frame citizens as criminals strike at the heart of the Constitution and the rule of law."