WASHINGTON — Homeland security officials, at the direction of the White House, are intensifying efforts to investigate voting by noncitizens in pursuit of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that illegal voting by immigrants lacking legal status is a rampant and insidious threat.

Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently issued a two-page memo requiring its employees to “review all open and closed voter fraud cases” involving immigrants who registered to vote, or actually voted, before they became naturalized U.S. citizens.

The memo, obtained by The New York Times, is part of an extraordinary all-fronts effort to insert federal law enforcement into the machinery of U.S. elections before the midterms. It is consistent with instructions the administration has issued to some U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country in recent weeks.

The initiative “reflects the administration’s commitment to safeguarding democratic processes and maintaining public confidence in the electoral system,” the memo stated.

The nationwide effort to find and charge criminal voting cases is meant to target all noncitizen voters but could have a particularly negative effect on current and former green card holders. While in the country legally, green card holders are not U.S. citizens and therefore may not vote legally in federal, state and most local elections — but might be unaware of these distinctions.

Such confusion is hardly unheard-of: It appeared to have been the cause of a small town mayor’s recent arrest on charges of voting illegally by state authorities in Kansas.

The push comes as an analysis of immigrant voting, commissioned by the Trump administration, has provided no evidence of widespread or even significant voter fraud, according to interviews with government officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

Officials referred about 10,000 of 49.5 million voter registrations to Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation.

That was roughly 0.02% of the names processed.

The Justice Department and Homeland Security Department declined to comment.

Trump “is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

“Noncitizens voting is a crime,” she added. “Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

Administration officials have pointed to an array of arrests and actions to justify cracking down on illegal voting, despite the lack of evidence that scattered irregularities and relatively rare instances of fraud have made a significant difference in recent elections.

Instead, they have presented as a major accomplishment the removal of dead voters from state rolls. They have also publicized the discovery of noncitizens, typically no more than a few hundred to about 1,000, who were registered illegally in Louisiana, Ohio and Texas and subsequently purged from the rolls.

A small percentage of those instances have resulted in actual prosecutions, however, and many of those cases have involved immigrants charged with more serious criminal offenses, including illegal gun possession.

The directive for HSI agents appears aimed at trying to determine if immigrants who became naturalized may have voted illegally before they gained citizenship. If so, the directive envisions not just charging them with certain crimes and misdemeanors, but might also strip them of their citizenship and deport them.

The administration’s efforts are not limited to cases related to immigration, but also those involving discredited conspiracy theories involving the foreign manipulation of voting machines and other claims of vote-fixing that served as the justification for the FBI’s seizure near Atlanta last month of ballots from the 2020 election.

An emerging focus of the administration’s effort is to scour voter rolls in populous conservative states, like Florida and Texas, whose state governments are working closely with the Trump administration. States controlled by Democrats have resisted efforts to give the administration access to such data.

The HSI memo and instructions given to career prosecutors cite Trump’s executive order on election security to provide a legal basis for their actions. A senior administration official said the initiative was not new but reflected the enactment of existing directives before the elections.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Glenn Thrush, Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz/Scott McIntyre
c.2026 The New York Times Company