A trove of internal Homeland Security Department (DHS) records has exposed a “national initiative” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) involving the voter records of tens of millions of Americans, CNN reported Wednesday.
“It appears the president and his allies want to pick their voters, as opposed to the way things are supposed to function in a democracy where voters pick their leaders,” said Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward, the legal advocacy organization that obtained the internal ICE records.
According to the internal records, ICE’s investigative division “ingested” 50.6 million voter records from a Justice Department data set and an additional 48.4 million from a data set obtained by DHS election researcher Heather Honey, described by Democracy Docket as an “election conspiracy theorist.”
The “extraordinarily large pools of data” were then used by ICE to conduct investigations using a “network-based investigative approach” that prioritized organizations over individuals, CNN reported. And, while “several” of those reviews “turned up no evidence of wrongdoing,” ICE still “contemplated more aggressive investigative tactics.”
“A June report said officials were exploring whether to use undercover agents to engage with organizations suspected of encouraging or facilitating illegal voter registration by noncitizens,” CNN’s report reads.
“New Jersey and Pennsylvania were identified as areas of focus. The document said undercover agents could be used to gather evidence and trace financial backing if investigators determined an organization was actively recruiting noncitizens to register.”
The timing of some of the internal records coincides with an FBI raid on the headquarters of an Ohio voter advocacy group in June. Records previously reviewed by CNN revealed that an ICE agent pressed election officials for information on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group that supports voter registration efforts. Four months later, the FBI raided the group’s offices, seizing documents and computer files.