Homeland Security Investigations agents fanned out across nine states this month on what the Department of Homeland Security is internally calling the "Unlawful Voter Initiative," a hunt for noncitizens on the voter rolls that runs through mid-October, weeks before the November midterms. At the same time, a federal judge in Boston has blocked the mail-ballot rules President Trump ordered built around the same effort, and the fight over that order is sitting at the Supreme Court right now.

What Is DHS's "Unlawful Voter Initiative"?

CNN first reported on August 31 that Homeland Security Investigations, the ICE division that normally chases human trafficking and drug smuggling, had been handed a "coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative" starting the next day. CNN's reporting, later expanded by The New York Times, describes hundreds of agents pulled off their normal caseloads to scour state voter files using names, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, then check them against DHS citizenship and immigration records.

Agents have made more than 1,000 referrals to HSI so far for field interviews and possible prosecution, according to a DHS official who spoke to the Times. A DHS spokesperson told ABC News that "HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders."

Which Nine States, and What Are Agents Doing There?

The surge covers Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut, running from early September through mid-October. In Georgia, DHS subpoenaed the secretary of state's office for 13 voter files. Deputy Secretary of State Gabe Sterling told the Daily Signal the request was small next to the state's 8 million registered voters and that his office is cooperating, adding that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's own review found Georgia's voter rolls "nearly 100% correct."

In Nevada, the elections office confirmed it had received seven separate FBI subpoenas seeking voter information, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said his office had not been told about new investigations directly and warned the effort would "sow distrust in the integrity of November's midterm elections." Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general, put it more bluntly: "If you have claims of voter fraud, bring it forward. I want to see it. And we know that they don't."

What Does Executive Order 14399 Actually Order?

The legal foundation for all of this is Executive Order 14399, "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections," which Trump signed on March 31 and which was published in the Federal Register on April 3. Section 2 directs DHS and the Social Security Administration to build a "State Citizenship List" for every state and directs the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting election officials who issue ballots to ineligible voters. Section 3 is the part now stuck in court: it ordered the Postal Service to write rules requiring Official Election Mail markings, barcoded ballot envelopes, state notice at least 90 days before an election and voter lists submitted 60 days out, with a final rule due within 120 days of the order.

How Many Noncitizens Has DHS Actually Found?

In a July prime-time address, Trump said a DHS review had identified more than 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. The DHS memo declassified that same day, cited by the Review-Journal, broke that down by state: 190,832 potential matches in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Separately, DHS told the Daily Signal that its SAVE citizenship-verification program has flagged more than 24,000 potential noncitizen registrants since April 2025, out of 60 million verification queries run in that span.

Those state-level numbers have not held up well under scrutiny. Aguilar's office called Nevada's 15,903 figure "speculative at best." CNN reviewed internal DHS records and found the agency privately told Nevada election officials it had confirmed just 185 cases, a small fraction of the nearly 16,000 it cited publicly. Nationally, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that supports stricter voting laws, has documented only about 100 confirmed cases of noncitizen voting between 1982 and 2025. The Times noted one of the largest recent clusters came from a New Jersey registration software error that improperly enrolled roughly 400 noncitizens, not intentional fraud.

Why Did a Federal Judge Just Block Half of Trump's Order?

The Postal Service's mail-ballot rule has bounced through the courts for months. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston first blocked it in August in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump. The Supreme Court stayed that injunction on August 24 by a 6-3 vote, ruling the challenge was premature because USPS had not yet finalized the rule. USPS published a final version two days later, and a 25-state coalition led by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell sued again immediately.

Talwani granted a 14-day restraining order on August 27, then converted it into a full preliminary nationwide injunction on September 4 that blocks USPS from enforcing the envelope-design, barcode and voter-list requirements through the November 3 election. She wrote that the government "have not made a strong showing that they are likely to succeed on the merits" and that last-minute implementation "nearly guarantee[s] significant disenfranchisement." Postmaster General David Steiner said USPS believes it "acted within our legal authority" but "will follow the court's determination." Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said the blocked rule "would sow chaos" for the midterms.

What Happens Next?

The Trump administration is not letting the injunction stand without a fight. The Justice Department appealed Talwani's ruling to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the same day it was issued and filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, docketed as 26A297, asking the justices to let the mail-ballot rule take effect while the case proceeds. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency matters from the 1st Circuit, set a deadline of 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 9, today, for the states and voting-rights groups to respond. No ruling had come down as of this writing.

What that means in practice: USPS is not implementing the barcode and envelope rules for this election, and will not unless the Supreme Court or the 1st Circuit grants the administration relief from Talwani's injunction. The HSI investigations in the nine states are a separate track and continue regardless of how the mail-ballot litigation ends, since that part of the order rests on the attorney general's prosecutorial authority rather than USPS rulemaking. Both pieces of Executive Order 14399 are aimed at the same November 3 elections, and both remain unsettled with less than two months to go.