dhs spokesperson

NEW YORK — A last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November’s elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws, according to a federal whistleblower’s statement released Monday.

The Department of Homeland Security probe known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” also asks employees to create federal law enforcement records about voters based on unreliable data, the account warns. That could potentially wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official documentation that could spur further investigation.

The anonymous, nearly 30-page disclosure was published Monday by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections.

It features screenshots and transcripts of a DHS training for a group of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers, who it says were forced in late August to drop their other work, complete a less than two-hour training session and begin running DHS-provided lists of individuals through state voter registration systems to find “unlawful voters.”

The whistleblower contends that agents have been asked to review 40 individuals per day, giving them about 12 minutes to determine whether each person is a legal voter and create federal records of anyone who is not.

Padilla and Schumer said Monday the initiative was an example of President Trump attempting to interfere in elections and the short timelines would impede officials from conducting proper investigations. They noted that the data DHS has on voters can be unreliable and differ from state records, making any federal findings based on that data potentially problematic.

“We just got more proof of Trump’s vile schemes to rig our elections,” Schumer told reporters in a news conference. “The lengths Trump will go to cheat, lie and steal in this upcoming election are simply beyond the pale.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has been targeting noncitizen voting to allege it could be a source of significant fraud during the midterm elections, even as research shows voting by people who are not citizens is extremely rare. Trump has been pushing for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters verified as U.S. citizens, and his Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.

The whistleblower report details an effort by the federal government to work around a lack of data from the states by directing Citizenship and Immigration Services employees to pose as individual voters to access their state voter records.

Some states, such as Virginia, explicitly limit their voter lookup tools to individuals who attest under penalty of law that they are looking up their own records. In other states, like California, personally identifiable information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number is needed to look up individual voter records.

The whistleblower said that when officers raised concerns about liability for searching the tools against state guidance, agency leaders told them to proceed with the searches anyway.

Schumer and Padilla on Sunday sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting more information about the initiative and demanding that it be stopped.

Asked about the whistleblower report, a DHS spokesperson said it is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.”

“The department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

In response to complaints about the timing, limited training and quotas for agents, the spokesperson said that “far from being rushed or untrained, these investigative efforts are conducted diligently and professionally.”

The New York Times first reported on the DHS initiative in early September.

The whistleblower account released Monday was produced by the watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund. The group, which said it represents the whistleblower as a client, said the person is anonymous because of “an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.

U.S. immigration officials arrested controversial British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos on Thursday in New Orleans, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Immigration officials announced on Friday that Yiannopoulos was arrested at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and accused him of overstaying after entering the United States legally in May 2019 through New York City. An immigration judge issued a final order of removal on July 22 after Yiannopoulos failed to show up for his immigration hearing, a DHS spokesperson wrote in an email.

“He chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws,” a spokesperson for DHS wrote in an emailed statement.

ICE’s online detainee locator doesn’t say where Yiannopoulos is being held but directs family and legal representatives to the agency’s office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a deportation hub for international flights.

Representatives of Yiannopoulos did not respond to a request for comment. It is unclear whether he has legal representation.

The British national has most recently worked for the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who is scheduled to perform in New Orleans on Friday evening.

Yiannopoulos is a well-known champion of conservative causes and has frequently taken provocative public positions criticizing feminism, Islam and immigrants. He has been especially supportive of President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“Zero immigration for the next 20 years. No ifs, no buts,” Yiannopoulos wrote on the social platform X last year.

Yiannopoulos rose to fame in the early 2010s as an incendiary writer for the conservative website Breitbart News. He resigned from the company in 2017 after a video of him endorsing pedophilia resurfaced online. He later apologized for the remarks and said he himself was a victim of sexual assault as a minor.

Yiannopoulos’ arrest Friday comes amid a nationwide uptick in detentions as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Far-right conservative activist Laura Loomer swiftly took to social media to applaud Yiannopoulos’ arrest after years of public feuding between the two personalities.

“I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” Loomer wrote on X.

Controversy around Yiannopoulos ballooned in 2017 when he carried out what he called his “Troll Academy Tour” across college campuses nationwide. Fights broke out when some students protested Yiannopoulos’ appearances and accused him of hate speech, while others celebrated him as a champion of free speech. Around that time, Buzzfeed reported on Yiannopoulos’ cozy relationships with self-proclaimed white nationalists.

In recent years, Yiannopoulos continued to work in the orbit of conservative activism. In 2022, he was an intern for former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, according to the Washington Post. He subsequently ran the short-lived 2024 presidential campaign for Ye. Most recently, Yiannopolous has worked as a spokesperson for Ye, who has been beset by controversy of his own following antisemitic comments that the rapper has since apologized for.

Riddle writes for the Associated Press.