Former Trump administration official Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Wednesday after hundreds of federal immigration officers were reportedly pulled from their regular duties and secretly reassigned to scrutinize voter rolls ahead of the midterm elections.
Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who anonymously blew the whistle on the first Trump administration, wrote in a new piece on Defiance.news that officials had repeatedly assured lawmakers that DHS had “no plans” to station immigration officers at polling locations.
“Evidently, all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place,” Taylor told readers Wednesday. “While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”
Citing a Tuesday Washington Post article that reported that hundreds of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers had been ordered to search voting lists for suspected noncitizens, Taylor warned: "This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections."
He said the secretive effort raises questions about potential abuses, oversight, and whether eligible American citizens could be unlawfully purged from voter rolls.
“Nothing in American history looks like this,” Taylor wrote. “Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”
He also openly questioned the administration’s claims about the scale of noncitizen voting.
“The point was never to find the fraud,” Taylor concluded Wednesday. “The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose.”
“That’s what they’re doing now,” he added.