Voting Groups Sue DHS Over Voter Records From 47 States, and Naturalized Citizens Have the Most at Stake

Three groups say DHS quietly assembled tens of millions of state voter records, checked them against immigration files and routed some toward enforcement tools without the notice federal privacy law requires.

The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the League of United Latin American Citizens sued the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday to stop what they call a secret program that collects state voter rolls and mines them for noncitizens. The complaint, filed in federal court in Washington against DHS, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations and USCIS, says the department holds some version of the voter lists of at least 47 states and asks the court to order the records destroyed and kept from the Justice Department.

The suit arrived less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, on the same day the Justice Department sued California over roughly 20,000 registered voters USCIS flagged as likely noncitizens, The Washington Post reported, and days after a separate ruling against the Justice Department’s own voter-roll program. It also opens a new front. In June, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the same court vacated the 2025 overhaul of SAVE, the USCIS tool election officials had used for bulk citizenship checks, according to The Washington Post and Votebeat. That ruling dealt with how the tool searches. This case goes after what DHS keeps.

The volume: A June 1, 2026 HSI report quoted in the complaint logs a “DOJ Dataset Intake” of 50.6 million records and a separate DHS intake of 48.4 million. The complaint does not say how much the two overlap.
The immigration link: The same report lists 26,563 USCIS-derived records prioritized for vetting.
The enrichment: The groups allege DHS layered on commercial data from LexisNexis’s Accurint service, including, a whistleblower says, Social Security numbers for Connecticut voters.
The enforcement link: HSI sought to load processed voter data into ELITE, a Palantir tool used to find targets for ICE operations. Like the rest of the list, this is an allegation drawn from internal records and a whistleblower; DHS has not yet answered in court.

Why naturalized citizens carry most of the risk

A citizenship check run against immigration files misfires most on people who are in those files. Most native-born citizens never appear in USCIS systems; naturalized citizens always do, first as visa or green card holders whose records carry a noncitizen label until the oath. USCIS naturalized 818,500 people in fiscal 2024 and more than 7.9 million over the past decade, by its own count. Children who became citizens automatically through a parent are more exposed still, since many never applied for a certificate and their USCIS file can end at the green card.

Earlier matching shows the pattern. Votebeat reported that Texas flagged 2,724 registrants as potential noncitizens through SAVE, and that at least 11 of the 97 flagged in Travis County were confirmed citizens. The new complaint says all 185 people DHS identified in Nevada turned out to be citizens, a plaintiffs’ figure not yet tested in court.

The allegation that matters most for travelers concerns TECS, the lookout system CBP officers consult at ports of entry. The complaint says flagged voters may receive TECS records, which can mean secondary inspection and lost Global Entry, and quotes a whistleblower saying DHS is “knowingly sweeping known US citizens” into the process. If that holds up, a false match follows a naturalized citizen to the airport, not just the polls.

A 1974 privacy law decides the first round

The strongest claims are procedural. The Privacy Act requires an agency keeping records retrievable by a person’s name or identifier to publish a system-of-records notice and give 30 days’ notice before new routine uses. The groups say DHS did neither, skipped Paperwork Reduction Act review, and acted beyond its authority, citing DHS’s own statement that ICE and HSI have no independent election role. They also invoke subsection (e)(7), which bars records on how people exercise First Amendment rights, arguing that voting history and party affiliation qualify.

The government’s likely reply sits in the same provision, which exempts records “pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity.” Voting by a noncitizen in a federal election is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 611 and a deportation ground, so DHS can call the matching investigative work. The open question is scale: an exception built for specific inquiries fits poorly with intakes of roughly 50 million records apiece, nearly all about citizens no one suspects. Standing may also be contested: in TransUnion v. Ramirez (2021), the Supreme Court held that an inaccurate file never shared with anyone does not by itself support a damages suit, one reason the groups stress the TECS flags and enforcement sharing.

What to watch

The government’s response: Federal defendants generally get 60 days after service to answer, past Nov. 3, unless the groups seek faster relief.
California: The Justice Department’s suit over the flagged voters will test whether courts accept USCIS matching as evidence.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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