Donald Trump is using more and more time and resources from the Department of Homeland Security to look into claims that there was voter fraud.A long report from CNN says that, during Trump’s second term, the DHS has moved away from focusing on election security to support Trump’s ongoing belief that the country’s elections are unfair.
This includes sending agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE that typically deals with human trafficking or drug smuggling, to gather evidence for Trump’s voter fraud claims.
HSI is supposed to check if naturalized U.S.
citizens voted or registered, and to start removal processes if a non-citizen is linked to voter fraud.
But there were several times when HSI agents looked into leads only to find out they had the wrong person, or that the person they were checking had never even voted in a U.S.
election, or hadn’t registered to vote.
In another case, HSI was looking into someone for illegally voting, but found out that the person who actually voted was their father.
Agents were also contacting local election officials while trying to prove Trump’s election fraud claims, often without much real evidence.
This included not giving the names of the people they were checking to the Fort Bend election director in Texas, so officials couldn’t confirm if they were targeting the right voters.
One agent said, “At this time, the information I sent is all we have.
If you could just proceed with the information provided, that would be great.We may have to do additional checks on our end.”
Brendan Fischer, director of strategic investigations at Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights group, told CNN, “This looks like DHS scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Fischer added that the DHS seems to be getting more desperate after expanding its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which was originally meant to check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
The expansion found many false examples of suspicious activity, but didn’t find widespread non-citizen voting.Now the administration is trying to cover up by sending HSI to check a very small number of possible cases.
A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast, “HSI is actively looking for and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.
We have shown that illegal aliens can and do vote in our elections.”
“The Department of Homeland Security is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and making sure only American citizens are electing American leaders,” the spokesperson added.
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