The Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating "literally thousands" of potential cases involving noncitizen voting, a senior Trump administration official said Sunday.
The investigations come amid an ongoing crackdown by the Trump administration to identify potential noncitizen voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reviewed tens of millions of voter records as part of that effort, while federal authorities have also investigated voting-related groups, according to records obtained by Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
"Noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections, so the question is simply how many of them there are," Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told CBS’ 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl.
When Stahl said the number of noncitizens who actually vote was small, Dhillon defended the administration’s efforts.
"The point is actually the opposite of what you were saying. It's not to sow distrust. The distrust is there. And so all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really in volume. And look, even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for noncitizen voting," Dhillon said.
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"13 people. I mean, the numbers are tiny," Stahl responded.
"So Lesley, we've been in office for less than two years. We've had investigations ongoing for over a year, and it takes time. There are literally thousands of them out there that we are looking at," Dhillon said.
Newsweek has contacted the DOJ for comment via email outside office hours.
While administration officials say tougher enforcement is needed to protect elections, documented cases of noncitizen voting have historically been rare. A Reuters review found the conservative Heritage Foundation had recorded 24 instances of noncitizen voting in U.S. elections between 2003 and 2023.
A Newsweek review of Justice Department press releases identified 72 people named in 2026 announcements involving alleged illegal voting or related election offenses, including voting by noncitizens and falsely claiming U.S. citizenship to register or vote. The charges are allegations, and defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
New Jersey Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill said on July 21 a software error in the state’s motor vehicle system had mistakenly registered roughly 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024. A preliminary state review found that fewer than 400 of those people later voted, and Sherrill ordered the erroneous registrations removed and launched an investigation into the failure.
In July, the Department of Homeland Security said preliminary reviews found there were 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. The figures referred to potential registrations, not ballots cast, and DHS did not provide evidence that those identified had voted.
Questions have also emerged over some of the administration’s initial estimates.
Nevada challenged the administration’s claims. DHS initially said as many as 15,903 noncitizens could be on the state’s voter rolls, but later provided officials with a list of 185 people it said had been manually reviewed and confirmed as noncitizens. Nevada officials said all 185 were U.S. citizens and that the federal government had not provided evidence to prove otherwise, according to The New York Times.
In Pennsylvania, DHS initially said as many as 14,576 noncitizens could be improperly registered to vote, but Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt later said federal officials acknowledged during an August 13 meeting that they did not have "high confidence" that those identified were, in fact, noncitizens improperly registered in the state.
On October 15, the Justice Department sued California, saying federal investigators had identified more than 20,000 registered voters they considered "likely noncitizens" and asking a federal court to halt the counting of their mail ballots until their citizenship could be verified. California officials have disputed the allegations and the accuracy of the federal data.
The administration has also faced repeated court defeats in its effort to obtain unredacted state voter rolls. Since September 2025, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., seeking the records, according to a ProPublica review. As of October 16, judges had issued final rulings in 26 of the cases, dismissing the government’s claims in all 26
The administration suffered a setback on October 9, when U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled that the Justice Department’s policy of obtaining state voter rolls, checking them against federal immigration data and asking states to remove people deemed ineligible was unlawful. Sooknanan found the policy violated federal privacy and administrative laws and exceeded the department’s authority.
The administration’s election efforts extend beyond identifying non-citizens on voter rolls. Federal agents seized more than 600 boxes of records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, under a criminal search warrant earlier this year, while Justice Department officials have also sought access to voting machines in several states, CBS reported.
Earlier this year, Trump also used a July address to argue for tighter voter identification and citizenship requirements, claiming newly declassified intelligence showed China had obtained 220 million U.S. voter files. An Associated Press review found the documents did not show that China or another foreign actor had manipulated votes or altered election results.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matt Cannon and Tony Phillips.