DHS Secretary Mullin threatened election officials with fines and prison time, citing unsubstantiated claim of 250,000 noncitizen voters

On July 17, 2026, one day after President Trump revived false 2020 election-fraud claims in a prime-time address, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin held a news conference in Washington, D.C. announcing that his department had identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada — the only Republican-led state of the four. Mullin released no supporting evidence or methodology, and PolitiFact reported that voting-data experts caution such large-sounding database counts routinely shrink once individually verified, and that DHS's figures do not establish that any flagged registrant ever cast a ballot.

Mullin announced DHS would make "security enhancements" mandatory for states that want federal election grants or reimbursement, tying continued funding to state cooperation with the department's SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database, through which DHS screens voter rolls against federal citizenship and immigration records. He further warned that state and local election officials who do not comply with the administration's directives "can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time."

The press conference extended an escalating federal campaign around the 2026 midterms: DHS's own SAVE database has since May 2026 been used to screen more than 67 million voter registrations, and the Justice Department warned election officials in more than a dozen states in early July that keeping noncitizens on the rolls could bring federal prosecution, using SAVE data a federal judge had ruled unlawful weeks earlier for flagging eligible citizens as ineligible. The Constitution's Elections Clause assigns administration of federal elections to the states, with Congress — not the executive branch — empowered to set overriding rules.

Updates

2026-07-30 — Pennsylvania demanded DHS substantiate its noncitizen voter-roll claims [5, 6]

On July 30, 2026, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt sent DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin a letter demanding DHS explain its methodology for claiming roughly 14,576 potential noncitizens were on Pennsylvania's voter rolls, and said he would not take steps to remove voters or share unredacted state voter data without that explanation. Nevada's secretary of state sent a similar letter the same week; officials in California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania all declined to share personally identifying voter data with DHS, and said the department had not shown how it matched Social Security numbers to voter registrants.

2026-08-20 — DHS confirmed it could substantiate only 185 of the nearly 16,000 noncitizens it claimed were on Nevada's voter rolls [7, 8]

In a virtual meeting with Nevada election administrators, DHS officials said they had identified just 185 "potential" noncitizens on the state's voter rolls, against the 15,903 the department had publicly claimed a month earlier as part of its 250,000-noncitizen, four-state count. Emails and a recording of the meeting showed DHS officials describing the original, nearly 16,000 figure as "the ceiling" of potential noncitizens and said roughly 14,000 additional names remained under further review. The list DHS shared with Nevada did not include the flagged individuals' names and was, according to the secretary of state's office, nearly impossible to independently verify.

2026-09-02 — Immigrant rights group sued DHS and DOJ over the voter-roll data-matching campaign [9, 10, 11]

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, represented by the UCLA Voting Rights Project, sued DHS and the Justice Department in federal court in Washington, D.C., seeking to block the administration from using undisclosed federal databases to screen California's voter rolls and to rescind DHS's July 16, 2026 letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber. That letter, quoted directly in subsequent reporting, cited an example of 81,336 California registrants whose name, date of birth, address and Social Security number DHS said matched a noncitizen in its files, and asked California to respond by July 30, 2026. Weber disputed DHS's findings, saying her office "has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official." A DHS spokesperson responded that the department "accessed publicly available data from states' voter rolls and cross referenced them with known illegal aliens in our systems."