Department of Homeland Security expert and whistleblower Miles Taylor warned that the Trump administration plans to use "woefully unequipped" agents for elections.
During a Tuesday appearance on CNN, Taylor responded to reports that DHS plans to launch voter fraud investigations into nine states, mostly blue states, and use Homeland Security Investigations agents to pursue leads and conduct field interviews to support prosecutorial review.
"This is complete madness," Taylor warned. "I've spent 20 years working with this department. I've worked with almost every homeland security secretary of every presidential administration of both parties, and most of them would tell you their immigration agents are absolutely, woefully unequipped to jump into an election and play a critical role in an election."
According to CNN, the agents that the sources say DHS is planning to use for elections typically track down cartels and human trafficking leads. Taylor said that DHS would need to train agents, including those from the Coast Guard or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, before sending them on an assignment from one agency to another. However, that's not the case here, Taylor said.
"They need to understand the left and right parameters of the law and what they are getting into," Taylor said. "These agents are not trained to do this. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen."
Taylor said that Trump's DHS has sent in agents without the necessary training before. "This is something that's actually now been going on for months," he said.
"The administration has had USCIS agents that are supposed to be investigating visa fraud — it retasked them this summer, almost everyone who was working on visa fraud, to start combing through voter rolls," Taylor said. "This is entirely inappropriate. I'm not going to send a baker into a hospital to do brain surgery on someone, yet that's what this administration is doing."
Summing up the Trump administration's strategy, he said, "they're just taking warm bodies in the department and throwing them at elections, and it's just, again, it's a recipe for disaster where people's rights may very well be violated."
