It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“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,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.) 

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted 

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

The post Inside Trump’s Failed Hunt for Noncitizen Voters appeared first on ProPublica.

Since he returned to office, President Donald Trump’s administration has upended foreign aid. It’s labeled well-established, long-running programs as “not aligned with American interests” and slashed their budgets. 

Still, the billions of taxpayer dollars Congress has allocated for foreign aid programs must be spent; lawmakers have insisted the government continue to fund humanitarian aid, global health and pro-democracy causes around the world. With most of the old programs now gone, however, we wanted to know: What is the Trump administration doing with that money now?

Recently, we published our investigation that found one answer to that question in a little-known bureau of the State Department that has dramatically transformed under Trump. For decades, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, known as DRL, has supported  human rights in some of the most oppressive countries in the world. Now, our reporting found,  it’s planning to direct funds to controversial groups supporting right-wing causes in Europe and elsewhere. 

Our full story lays out some of the groups the government has considered funding, which include a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and a British American think tank created this year to focus on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation.” (Administration officials dropped that grant after significant pushback from Congress.) 

One proposed grant particularly caught our attention: Trump administration officials suggested funding research on crime against minority populations in South Africa. 

It’s clear from sources we spoke with that the key targeted minority population in question is the white ethnic group known as Afrikaners. Afrikaners were responsible for creating the nation’s infamous and brutal racially segregated apartheid system. Previously, DRL staff had been told to begin the process of awarding funds to a group called Lex Libertas, which was founded by a controversial figure who has called for Afrikaner self-governance. The group is currently fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers.

The proposed grant was later opened up to allow a broader set of invited groups to apply for $1 million of funding, though it is still intended for the same purpose, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, citing ongoing deliberations, but said the Trump administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. Lex Libertas did not respond to questions about the organization or the proposed grant.

Former diplomats who have worked extensively on human rights told us they were shocked that the victimization of white South Africans would be prioritized over the serious issues elsewhere in the region. 

“It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official said when we asked him about the grant. South Africa is plagued by violence, but extensive research has found that white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups.

Experts also described the proposed grant to fund research into violence against Afrikaners as keeping with the Trump administration’s overall stance toward South Africa.

For decades, the U.S. relationship with the country has been symbolized by our massive support for HIV care, Mattie Webb, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute who studies South Africa and U.S. foreign policy, told us. 

Since Trump returned to office, there’s been a stark shift as the administration has strengthened ties with borderline white nationalist groups that are considered fringe in South Africa. 

“The U.S. is very clearly shifting its priorities away from aid that would benefit far more people in South Africa to this narrow focus on the white minority,” Webb said.

In the last 18 months, Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and used claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off U.S. funding for HIV treatment and research. And even as he’s barred nearly all new refugees from the United States, he’s welcomed white South Africans, fast-tracking their entry.  

There have long been tensions between South Africa and the U.S., former diplomats told us, but the aid the U.S. provided saved lives and helped sustain a working relationship that is vital to U.S. national security and economic interests. Now, by seeking to fund a movement antagonistic to the South African government, the U.S. risks driving a wedge between the two nations.

Other grants also raised red flags for experts and lawmakers. Political appointees at the State Department are considering funding a British free-speech organization that has fought bans on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. That proposed $5 million grant would provide support for people facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document we reviewed. (The organization’s founder said it had “neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government” but did not respond to our other questions.) And a call for proposals recently released by the bureau would fund research, conferences and cultural engagements in wealthy democracies to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe.” 

Not all the proposed funding is directed to controversial groups, our reporting found. But even some of the grants slated to fund more traditional human rights projects skirt federal requirements for competitive bidding that are meant to deter waste, fraud and abuse. Instead, officials are trying to direct millions to handpicked organizations, according to sources and documents. 

In response to questions about our reporting, the State Department stressed that the process of awarding grants is ongoing and that multiple offices provide input, writing that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” 

We are continuing to report on foreign aid and the Trump administration’s policies in South Africa. If you have tips or information we should know about either of these issues, please feel free to get in touch with us! Reach out via phone or Signal to Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131 or Sharon Lerner at 718-877-5236.

The post What Is the Trump Administration Doing With Foreign Aid Money? appeared first on ProPublica.

Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The complaints filed by Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cite a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how CBS or its parent company, now Paramount, have for years given FCC commissioners tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, which the television network sponsors. The commissioners accepted the gifts even as the FCC was reviewing or about to review major Paramount business decisions, including two megamergers.

Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance.

ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts.

Carr, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats. 

The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22. 

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

“The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”

Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”

The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger.

The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office.

The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities.

Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval.

“The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts.

“The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated.

CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden.

“Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.”

The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition.

California, New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks.

Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.

The post FCC Commissioners Face Ethics Complaints for Taking Luxury Gifts From Paramount appeared first on ProPublica.

On the northeast edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly 1,100 people gathered in late June for the International Bridge Walk across the long span that links two cities with the same name: Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Both the sun and the sentiments were bright.

“We don’t like to say there’s a border there, because we’re twin cities. We’re one family, the countries of Canada and the United States,” Don Gerrie, mayor of the Michigan Sault (pronounced “Soo”), told the crowd ahead of the annual walk.

He sported a black ballcap that he said was given to him by his counterpart in the Ontario Sault. It featured flags from both nations with the words “Stronger Together” and “Allies and Friends.”

Canadians in cheerful patriotic attire joined the bridge walk, with maple leaves tagging their scarves and socks, shirts and shorts. Americans came out in star-spangled T-shirts heralding the nation’s 250th birthday. But this lively tradition is clouded by an increasingly hostile relationship between the U.S. and Canada.

Traffic over the bridge is way down. And, in recent weeks, President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs in retaliation for thick wildfire smoke wafting into the U.S. When his administration announced an additional 50% tariff on an array of Canadian products, the White House cited “Canada’s discriminatory treatment of American products.” Then, using a separate mechanism, it hit Canada with a further 10% in tariffs.

Following pressure from the Trump administration that delayed it, a new publicly owned bridge, the Gordie Howe, opened Monday between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Canada hosted a Canada-only opening ceremony.

Trump wasn’t present for the bridge’s ribbon-cutting, even though he used to cheer the project. Up at the Sault bridge, there was no sign of the region’s congressional representative at the celebration of international friendship, even though, during Trump’s first term, Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican, hailed relations with Canada.

In 2020, when Bergman was appointed to an interparliamentary group that provides a forum for exchange between Canadian and American legislators, he boasted of the Sault bridge as a point where “millions” cross every year “to conduct business, shop, work and enjoy what each country has to offer.”

Yet Bergman, who is endorsed by Trump in an upcoming contested primary, has been virtually silent on the new tariffs and their blowback in local communities, even as he’s prodded to speak out by many of his constituents. The only references to Sault Ste. Marie in the news items on his website during Trump’s second term are a mention of an infrastructure project and a February 2025 letter to the president about a purported member of a Venezuelan gang crossing the border.

As Canada responds to Trump’s moves with emergency interventions and “buy local” boosterism, significantly fewer Canadians are crossing the border for once-ordinary activities: shopping, eating, fueling vehicles, vacationing or visiting family and friends.

The Sault area lost at least $82.9 million last year in local spending because of decreased crossings, according to an estimate from the International Bridge Administration, which manages the span: $62.7 million on the Michigan side and $20.2 million on the Ontario side.

There were 270,000 fewer total crossings last year at the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge — nearly a 24% drop from 2024, exceeding similar declines at Michigan’s other border crossings. Based on the currency used to pay bridge fares and information from the Canadian prime minister’s office, the drop is largely due to the loss of Canadian travelers. Halfway into 2026, auto traffic has lingered at the same lower volume, according to the bridge director, while commercial traffic has fallen nearly 15% further. 

Nationwide, the total number of Canadians returning from the United States last year dropped by more than 25%, according to data from the Canadian government.

“What Canadians have done, of course, is they’re boycotting the U.S.,” said Michael Broadway, a geographer and professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University who has researched the travel trends (and joined the bridge walk). Ordinary people can only do so much about federal politics, he said, “but what they can do is they can vote with their feet.”

The Sault bridge spans the St. Mary’s River, just west of the historic Soo Locks that serve as a hinge between two of the largest Great Lakes, Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soaring high above the water to clear the thousand-foot freighters, it’s a critical gateway for commerce. And it’s the only vehicular border crossing for hundreds of miles in either direction.

The drop in traffic reversed a post-pandemic uptick, said Peter Petainen, bridge director and an Ontario Sault native. Just as the numbers were recovering, he told ProPublica, “the federal tariff dispute occurred and we’ve fallen off.”

Others noted that the turn in how the U.S. approaches noncitizens may have also chilled travel. Stories of Canadians detained in the U.S. are recurring headlines up north. And the Canadian dollar also doesn’t go as far as it once did in the U.S.

Altogether, it’s a problem for Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula — and also for the publicly owned bridge, which depends on tolls for maintenance and operations. As the bridge authority put it in its five-year plan, issued in December: “Border challenges negatively affecting bridge traffic, trade and tourism may significantly reduce bridge revenue or increase expenditures beyond operational sustainability.”

Wilda Hopper, co-owner of Bird’s Eye Outfitters in the Michigan Sault, feels the change. She said that the drop-off in Canadian visitors was most noticeable in the off-season, when her gear shop and cafe relies on the local community — including those from the Ontario Sault — to carry it through the snowy months.

Between fewer Canadian customers and rising costs, Hopper said, business is down about 27% compared with what it was last summer.

“I can tell you that I’ve spoken to business after business up in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and in the eastern Upper Peninsula, and they’re all feeling the pressure from this,” said Michigan state Sen. John Damoose, a Republican who represents the community in Lansing. “Mackinac Island’s feeling the pressure, everybody is feeling the heat from this deterioration in our relationship with Canada.”

It’s a bewildering fallout, he said. After a brutal ice storm last year, he remembered Canadians crossing the Sault bridge to help Michiganders repair the electrical grid. “This is our best friend in the entire world,” Damoose said.

Only so much can be done about it from the statehouse, though, when it’s Republicans in Washington in the power position. Two of Michigan’s voices in Washington are the Democratic Sens. Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin. They don’t flatly oppose tariffs, but they have challenged Trump’s approach, calling it, respectively, “chaotic” and “sloppy.” Slotkin has said that, constitutionally, only Congress can levy tariffs or raise taxes. Peters introduced bipartisan legislation that seeks more tariff transparency.

Bergman, who has represented a district that encompasses the Upper Peninsula and an additional northern swath of the state’s “mitten” since 2017, once stressed the critical role Canada plays in Michigan’s economy. He vowed to work with the Canadian Parliament to “expand market access between both our nations” during Trump’s first term. And he championed the president’s new North American trade deal with Canada and Mexico, citing the benefits for Michigan’s farmers, small businesses and consumers.

But Trump’s trade policies have made it hard on many Republicans who once touted free trade. Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada and a former Michigan congressman, pivoted dramatically on trade in the Trump era, as ProPublica reported.

Since Trump started his second term, there’s been no mention of tariffs in the press releases, articles and op-eds on Bergman’s website. Along with three of his colleagues in Congress, he criticized Canada’s handling of wildfires that sent thick smoke into Michigan in a recent letter to the prime minister.

ProPublica reached out to Bergman, his office and his campaign multiple times for comment on what’s happening in his district and received no response. Besides Trump’s endorsement, his reelection is supported by the Michigan and U.S. chambers of commerce.

He’s facing two challengers in the Republican primary on Aug. 4. Both of them told ProPublica that the district benefits from sustainable trading relationships.

They also echoed what many of Bergman’s constituents told ProPublica: that residents have had scarce opportunities to connect with the congressman in person. Bergman doesn’t appear to have hosted a public town hall in the district since his first year in office.

Bergman, who has a house in Louisiana, has faced long-standing allegations that he doesn’t even make Michigan his true home. Julie Hoffmeyer, a former member of Bergman’s staff who supports one of his primary challengers, told ProPublica that the congressman refers to his property in the western Upper Peninsula as a “cabin” or a “camp.”

Bergman, responding to past challenges to his Michigan residency, has called his home there his primary residence and noted that he’s a registered voter in the state.

Trump’s quick-shifting trade policies are especially difficult for Michigan’s agriculture industry, the state’s second-largest sector, according to a recent report from the state’s agriculture department. The report, which hasn’t yet been publicly released, said that exports to Canada fell 12.3% last year, “signalling severe strain with a country that is our strongest trading partner.”

Meanwhile, the relationship between the U.S. and Canada is fraying ever further. A White House fact sheet on the new 50% tariff acknowledged the ways that Canadians have changed how they do business.

The White House said that Canadian imports of U.S. motor vehicles dropped by about 22% between April 2025 and March 2026, compared with the same period the year before. And, it said, due to provincial restrictions, Canadian imports of U.S. alcoholic beverages have plummeted.

Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said in a letter posted on social media that the series of tariffs imposed by the U.S. began with ones that were “in direct violation” of the standing North American trade deal — the deal from Trump’s first term that he once celebrated, and that Bergman described as a great economic victory for Michigan.

With the deal up for review this year, the Trump administration declined a long-term extension of the pact. Carney has also widely signaled that Canada is looking beyond its near neighbor for trading partners.

Carney said, in an April video posted on his YouTube channel: “Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses — weaknesses that we must correct.”

The post As Trump’s Tariff War With Canada Drags On, This Border Community Suffers Without a Voice appeared first on ProPublica.