ICE has spent the past year scrutinizing nonprofit organizations that help Americans register to vote, raising serious civil liberties concerns across the country.
Internal government documents obtained by the legal nonprofit Democracy Forward reveal that Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative arm, examined hundreds of voter registration organizations nationwide.
The review included at least 82 organizations in Pennsylvania and 41 in New Jersey, two states that have historically drawn intense scrutiny during federal election integrity efforts.
Democracy Forward obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, giving the public its first detailed look at the scope of this domestic investigative effort.
The documents show the agency considered deploying undercover agents to communicate with organizations suspected of helping noncitizen individuals register to vote.
A June report included in the documents reveals that investigators had ingested 50.6 million records from a Justice Department dataset, adding to their pool of potential leads.
Beyond that dataset, investigators pulled in another 48.4 million records from what the documents describe as “independent sources,” bringing the total to nearly 100 million records under analysis.
Homeland Security Investigations said it opened 418 voter-fraud cases this year, but 318 of those cases were never referred for prosecution, suggesting the sweeping effort produced limited actionable results.
The agency’s focus extended beyond swing states, with investigators also targeting nonprofits and organizations operating in Washington, D.C., and Minnesota, according to the documents.
Homeland Security Investigations concentrated a significant portion of its resources on groups operating in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where election outcomes carry outsized national political weight.
Perhaps most alarming to civil liberties advocates, state voter-roll information may have been entered into Palantir’s (PLTR) ELITE system, a powerful ICE tool used to identify, prioritize, and locate individuals targeted for immigration enforcement.
The potential use of voter registration data inside an immigration enforcement platform blurs a historically firm line between civic participation records and law enforcement targeting systems.
Democracy Forward has framed the investigation as a significant overreach that threatens the integrity of nonprofit civic engagement work across the United States.
