Federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been knocking on residents’ doors across several US states to question people about their immigration status and whether they have registered to vote or cast ballots in past elections, according to a CBS News report .
On Monday, the Justice Department announced that DHS agents in California had arrested more than 20 people, all green card holders, over allegations that they had illegally registered or voted. One case involved a 72-year-old man from Belize accused of voting illegally in four elections. The allegations have not been established in court.
The operation aims to investigate potential noncitizen voting ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections . DHS has alleged that as many as 250,000 noncitizens could be illegally registered to vote, although election experts have disputed the accuracy of the figure. 156 people have been charged with voting-fraud-related offences since the beginning of the Trump administration, according to the Department of Justice. The US has around 227 million registered voters. A USCIS whistleblower said in September that employees were asked to review voter information for tens of thousands of people, including citizens, with a target of 40 subjects per day.
“What we’re seeing now is the federal government is inserting itself into the state process for verifying their voter roles in an unprecedented way,” Jessica Marsden, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, which is suing the federal agency over the campaign, told CBS News. The home visits intensified in September and continued through the past weekend, according to CBS News. The initiative, described in an internal directive as a “Criminal Voter Fraud” operation, includes field reviews in at least six states: California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. Investigators draw on government databases, voter rolls and other datasets before attempting to match names against citizenship information held by US Citizenship and Immigration Services ( USCIS ), according to CBS News.
Internal documents reviewed by the news organization indicate that hundreds of agents were reassigned from other cases to investigate alleged noncitizen voting.
