Donald Trump is using an increasing amount of the Department of Homeland Security’s time and resources trying to uncover disputed claims of voter fraud.
A lengthy report from CNN notes how, under Trump’s second term, the DHS has shifted its focus away from election security toward helping fuel the president’s long-running obsession with proving the country’s elections are rigged.
This includes assigning agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a branch of ICE that usually investigates human trafficking or drug smuggling, to gather evidence to prove the president’s voter fraud claims.
Part of the HSI’s remit involves probing whether naturalized U.S. citizens registered or voted, or launching removal proceedings when a noncitizen is suspected of or linked to voter fraud.
However, there were several occasions when HSI agents investigated leads only to later find that they had identified the wrong people, that the person they were probing had never tried to cast a ballot in a U.S. election, or had not even registered to vote.
In another case, HSI was investigating someone for illegally casting a ballot, only to discover that the person who voted was actually their father.
Agents were also bothering local election officials while trying to prove Trump’s election fraud claims, often with little or no information to back them up. This included failing to provide names to the office of the election director in Fort Bend, Texas, to ensure officials had identified the correct voters.
“At this time, the information I sent is all we have. If you could just proceed with the information provided, that would be great,” the agent replied. “We may have to do additional checks on our end.”
“This looks like DHS scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Brendan Fischer, director of strategic investigations at Campaign Legal Center, a voting-rights advocacy group, told CNN.
Fischer added that the DHS appears to be getting more desperate after the expansion of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to check voter rolls flagged multiple erroneous examples of suspicious activity. The SAVE program was originally designed to help states verify the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
“The expansion of SAVE failed to substantiate claims of widespread noncitizen voting, so now the administration is trying to save face by directing HSI investigators to pursue a very limited number of potential cases,” Fischer said.
“HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found. We have repeatedly demonstrated that illegal aliens can and do vote in our elections,“ a DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
“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.”
