Unlawful Voter Initiative: Lawsuit Challenges USCIS

A coalition of Asian American and voting rights groups sued the Department of Homeland Security on Oct. 28 to shut down the Unlawful Voter Initiative, a USCIS program that sends fraud investigators into state voter records to look for noncitizen voters. The suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, argues that the program singles out naturalized Americans and runs on data the government itself has had to walk back.

The case lands five days before the Nov. 3 midterms and a week after a federal judge in the same district limited DHS home visits in nine states. That order dealt with the front door. The new complaint targets how a name lands on a DHS list in the first place.

How the Unlawful Voter Initiative works, according to the complaint

OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, two of its California chapters and Common Cause, represented by the ACLU and Asian Americans Advancing Justice groups, sued DHS, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, USCIS and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow (No. 3:26-cv-12617, N.D. Cal.).

The complaint says USCIS adopted the initiative in August 2026, pulling fraud investigators off other work. It describes three steps. DHS builds a list of voters it suspects registered or voted as noncitizens. Agents use personal information from that list to search state voter-registration websites, which the complaint says happens “almost always without authorization.” When an agent suspects illegal voting, the agent opens a record in TECS, a DHS law enforcement database. These are allegations, and the court has made no findings; DHS did not immediately respond to Reuters.

The complaint says the list covers hundreds of thousands of people in all 50 states, draws on federal sources including SAVE, the USCIS status-verification system, plus commercial databases, and that everyone on it has at least one A-number, the identifier USCIS assigns in immigration files.

That detail carries the case. People born in the United States do not have A-numbers, so a list built on them reaches only people who passed through the immigration system, whose older records can lag behind the oath ceremony that made them citizens. The lead claim rests on the Civil Rights Act’s uniform standards provision, 52 U.S.C. 10101(a)(2)(A), which bars officials from applying different standards to different voters when deciding who is qualified. The groups also invoke the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, and they ask the court to vacate the initiative, halt investigations under it and expunge the TECS records it produced.

Shrinking estimates, small prosecution numbers

The government’s estimates have moved sharply. The complaint says DHS put Nevada’s noncitizen registrants at 16,000, then 185, after which Nevada said all were citizens, and that Mullin’s July suggestion of more than 190,000 in California became 20,000 by Oct. 13. Reuters reported Oct. 28 that California reviewed 200 registrations from the federal list and found nearly 40 percent appeared to belong to U.S.-born citizens.

Criminal cases are far fewer than the names on those lists. Reuters counted at least 147 people accused under the federal law against voting by noncitizens since President Trump returned to office, 102 of them since the start of September, which it said is fewer than one for every million people who voted in 2024. The Justice Department’s Oct. 26 announcement alone listed 48 people charged, 47 of them green card holders. Reuters also documented more than 100 federal subpoenas for voter records in at least 13 states.

The administration frames all of this as enforcing a clear law. “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 told Reuters. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter acknowledged to Reuters that the California list could include citizens, saying, “We’re not perfect.” Noncitizen voting in federal elections is a crime and can lead to deportation. The plaintiffs see it differently. “The Trump administration is challenging voters and threatening states based off flawed and outdated data,” Theresa J. Lee of the ACLU Voting Rights Project said in the groups’ announcement.

Why the case matters more after Election Day

According to the complaint, the Oct. 21 injunction in California Nurses Association v. Mullin runs until 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, and the plaintiffs say those limits lapse on Election Day. Unless a judge acts within days, the case will matter mostly after the vote: whether TECS records on naturalized citizens stay in DHS files, and whether the list can feed post-election challenges or later investigations. The same data questions run through DOJ’s demands that California counties and Washington state set aside ballots, and a judge this month struck down DOJ’s nationwide voter-roll citizenship checks over the risk of flagging naturalized Americans.

The first fight is likely to be procedural: agencies sued over internal investigative programs routinely argue there is no final agency action for a court to review, and the answer will decide whether the judge ever reaches the data.

What to watch:

Whether the plaintiffs seek a temporary restraining order before Nov. 3.
The 8 p.m. Nov. 3 expiration of the nine-state injunction on DHS home visits.
Court rulings on DOJ’s demands to hold ballots in California and Washington.

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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