Hundreds of USCIS Fraud Officers Are Pulled Off Immigration Screening to Hunt for Noncitizen Voters, Former Officials Say

Three former officials told The Washington Post that fraud detection officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been reassigned to screen state voter data for noncitizens who registered to vote, and are effectively no longer screening immigration applications for false information or security threats. The officers belong to the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. A USCIS spokesman said the department "is working with states to lawfully obtain voter records to cross reference with USCIS information." Separately, ICE's Homeland Security Investigations sought contractors to handle "secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files."

Shifting a security-screening workforce onto election records redirects a vetting function Congress funded for immigration benefits, and it comes as the agency is under court orders to restart several types of legal immigration processing.

"If they're doing this, clearly they're not adjudicating those cases," one former official said. DHS told Nevada officials it had confirmed 185 noncitizen registrations there, with more than 14,000 cases still under review.