Trump Administration's Hunt for Noncitizen Voters Reaches Texas: More Than 100 Subpoenas for Voter Records in at Least a Dozen States
Six days before Election Day, Reuters has documented a sweeping federal records campaign - grand jury subpoenas included - that reaches from Minneapolis and Los Angeles into competitive states including Texas, Kansas and Georgia.
HOUSTON - The Trump administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least a dozen states, Reuters reported Wednesday, in an escalating effort ahead of next week's midterm elections to uncover unlawful voting by people who are not U.S. citizens. Most of the subpoenas Reuters documented were issued to state and local election officials in the past three months, though some date to the start of the year, and many were previously unreported. At least 44 were issued under grand jury authority, which Reuters noted makes them generally harder to challenge in court. The demands reach Democratic strongholds including Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Los Angeles - and Republican-leaning states with competitive races, including Texas, Kansas and Georgia.
The White House says the effort is warranted. "The Trump administration is sending a clear message that anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable," White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement to Reuters. "Only Americans should be electing America's leaders." The Justice Department, which declined to confirm or deny its use of subpoenas, said it "will enforce the law wherever the evidence leads"; the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Reuters' questions. The subpoenas run alongside a broader campaign: the Justice Department has sued 30 states that refused to provide voter rolls containing sensitive personal information, courts have ruled against the department in every voter-roll case so far with many under appeal, and a federal judge largely halted Homeland Security field operations in nine states on October 21.
Legal experts told Reuters the records could be used to contest results in close races, even though multiple studies and a Reuters analysis have found noncitizen voting exceedingly rare. Federal prosecutors have accused at least 147 people of illegally voting since the president returned to office - 102 of them since the start of September, most cases unresolved - fewer than one accusation for every million people who voted in 2024, by Reuters' analysis. "In my time as a federal prosecutor, we prosecuted people who shouldn't have voted, but it was so infrequent as to never even come close to altering the outcome of an election," Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney for Arizona under President George W. Bush, told Reuters. With Democrats needing four Senate seats and five House seats to take control of Congress, what election officials do with the subpoenas - and what campaigns do with the answers after November 3 - is now part of the closing week's story in Texas and nationally.
