Ranking Members Raskin, Morelle Demand Answers on Trump Administration’s Use of Bogus Noncitizen Claims to Strip Americans of Their Voting Rights

After Wrongly Flagging 185 American Citizens in Nevada, Trump Administration Sues California for Refusing to Disenfranchise Voters and Threatens Election Workers With Prosecution

Washington, D.C. (October 23, 2026)—Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Joe Morelle, Ranking Member of the Committee on House Administration, demanded answers from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the Trump Administration’s use of baseless noncitizen voting claims to bully states into disenfranchising American citizens ahead of the midterm elections.

“The stakes for our democracy in this offensive could not be higher. Under the Constitution, the States are primarily responsible for election administration and Congress has the final say on the time, place, and manner of federal elections. To the extent DHS has a role in elections at all, it is only to fulfill Congress’s assigned statutory purposes. The Department should be focused on providing the states resources that Congress has appropriated to it to support State and local elections officials at their request. Instead, DHS and President Trump are engaging in increasingly brazen bully tactics to force states to illegally remove eligible voters hand-picked by the Administration from their voter rolls,” wrote the Ranking Members.

In July, Secretary Mullin and President Trump publicly claimed that DHS had identified more than 250,000 potential noncitizens illegally registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. But the Administration’s allegations fell apart in Nevada. DHS initially claimed to have identified 15,903 potential noncitizens, then supplied just 185 names it said it had “confirmed” were not U.S. citizens. Nevada officials reviewed their records and determined that all 185 were American citizens eligible to vote. In essence, the Administration tried to deprive American citizens of their right to vote with false accusations. 

Rather than admitting that failure and learning from it, the Trump Administration has escalated its intimidation campaign in California. In an October 13 letter, the Department of Justice (DOJ) imposed an arbitrary 48-hour deadline for California to review 20,000 namessupplied on a thumb drive, require Los Angeles County to set aside ballots already received from those individuals, and stop sending them mail-in ballots. The letter provided no explanation of how DHS determined that the individuals were noncitizens.

When California refused to submit to this lawless and unworkable ultimatum, DOJ sued. It then threatened to prosecute election officials who knowingly count ballots cast by people federal agencies identify as noncitizens, even as DHS conceded that the people it flagged were only “likely” noncitizens.

Noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare. Yet the Trump Administration continues to weaponize these claims to target voters and intimidate the local officials and citizen volunteers responsible for administering our elections.

Ranking Members Raskin and Morelle requested a briefing as soon as practicable on the evidence behind DHS’s allegations, the data and methods used in its supposedly “rigorous manual review process,” and whether DHS took steps to distinguish recently naturalized Americans from noncitizens before targeting their voter registrations.

Click here to read the letter.