How Trump’s Unprecedented Effort to Prosecute Noncitizen Voters Fell Apart

In late March, Joe Teirab, deputy head of the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota, received an urgent email from Washington. The federal government was seeking criminal cases to substantiate President Donald Trump's claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens in American elections. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to various locations, including Minnesota, to build these cases.

Teirab, a former Marine and Harvard Law graduate, had been under pressure to produce results, as instructed by a senior Justice Department official. He informed his staff that after subpoenaing records on about 130 individuals, only one had been referred for prosecution. HSI agents had inundated local election offices with demands for voting histories, demonstrating a "complete lack of understanding" of the complexities involved in illegal voting investigations. Teirab concluded that the HSI task force had been "disjointed and disorganized."

Since Trump's return to the White House, his administration has undertaken an unprecedented series of initiatives to find and prosecute noncitizen voters, a claim Trump has made without any evidence. The Department of Homeland Security, HSI's parent agency, released documents claiming to have identified over 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all of which were run by Democrats.

However, these documents failed to explain the methodology behind this figure. Trump frequently claimed the American election system was "so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it."

ProPublica's investigation reveals the administration's use of HSI's personnel, technology, and expansive legal authority for its election agenda. Career staffers at the Justice Department had warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to identify noncitizen voters could potentially violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, experienced HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency's databases and tools to search these lists would yield excessive mismatches and inflated results. Despite these concerns, the administration pressed forward with the initiative.

The investigation found that between January 2025 and May 2026, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution, and only 41 were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. This is particularly concerning given that over 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.

ProPublica's reporting shows that HSI's involvement in the search for election fraud began as early as summer 2025, when a midlevel agent proposed using the agency's databases and tools to identify noncitizens on publicly available voter lists. The Justice Department had previously collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over unredacted versions.

These searches resulted in tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. However, when HSI agents investigated these leads, the results were similar to those reported by Teirab in Minnesota.

Administration officials maintained that HSI's initiative was producing meaningful results, stating, "President 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 non-citizen voters."

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson also defended the effort, claiming that "it's an easy step to secure our elections." However, the agency declined to disclose the specific tools or techniques HSI used to achieve these results.