DHS acknowledges its noncitizen voter-roll numbers were inflated, internal calls show

The Department of Homeland Security privately acknowledged to election officials in Nevada and Pennsylvania this month that the sweeping noncitizen-voter numbers it touted publicly this summer have not held up to scrutiny, according to internal communications and call summaries reviewed by NPR. More than five weeks after President Trump announced in a primetime address that his administration had uncovered more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, those states are still waiting for DHS to produce a verified list of names or explain how it reached its figures.

A viral claim, a quiet retreat

On a call with Nevada officials this month, a Department of Homeland Security official told the state that an earlier estimate of nearly 16,000 potential noncitizen voters was, in her words, "the ceiling" rather than a confirmed count, and that each name still required individual review. Mark Wlaschin, Nevada's deputy secretary of state for elections, pressed the point directly, warning that overzealous vetting carries its own risk.

"The integrity of the electoral process in our state is of supreme importance. The vetting is also equally important, though, right? Because we also don't want to inadvertently accuse a U.S. citizen of not being a citizen and then they're terrified and disenfranchised from that part of the process."

A day after that call, DHS sent Nevada a narrowed list of 185 voter identification numbers the agency said it was confident belonged to noncitizens. When the state asked for the underlying data points used to make those matches, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials declined, saying they preferred to share only ID numbers. Nevada's elections division responded in an Aug. 20 email that it was "unable to conduct an analysis without real verifiable information." A similar pattern played out in Pennsylvania, where an official with direct knowledge of a comparable call, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told NPR it was "clear that DHS did not have confidence that the numbers they have stated publicly were accurate." Pennsylvania has not received any refined list at all.

The gap between the headline and the count

The distance between what DHS announced and what it can currently substantiate is large. According to figures reported by the nonprofit newsroom Votebeat, the department's public claims and its more cautious internal figures diverge sharply state by state:

• Nevada: as many as 15,903 potential noncitizens claimed publicly; roughly 8,576 came up as possible matches against federal records; only 185 have been confirmed through full manual review, according to the DHS official on the August call.
• Pennsylvania: up to 14,576 claimed; about 8,594 flagged as matches; no confirmed, vetted list has been shared with the state.
• California: as many as 190,832 claimed; roughly 81,336 flagged as matches, meaning fewer than half of the original figure has even cleared the first screening step.
• New Jersey: up to 35,152 claimed; about 19,497 flagged as matches, while the state's own audit reportedly identified only around 6,600 records warranting further review.

Summed together, the public figures reach the roughly 256,000 total Mr. Trump cited on July 16; the matched-but-unverified figure is closer to 118,000; and the number DHS has said it can currently stand behind with confidence, at least in Nevada's case, is 185.

How the claim was built

The push originated with an executive order directing Homeland Security to compile a national picture of noncitizen registration, using publicly available voter files cross-checked against federal immigration and Social Security records. Nevada's secretary of state, Francisco Aguilar, called the state's initial 15,903 figure "wildly speculative" when DHS first sent it in July, noting that public voter rolls do not contain Social Security numbers, raising questions about how the matches were made in the first place. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber went further, writing to DHS that her office has "serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims," according to a letter detailed by the voting-rights news service Democracy Docket, and said state law bars California from handing sensitive voter data to federal agencies.

The DHS official leading the outreach to states, Heather Honey, is a longtime Pennsylvania election activist who spent years questioning the 2020 results before being appointed deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in 2025. On the Nevada call, Honey told officials, "We are an open book here. We are acting in very good faith. And we just want to help you." Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator confirmed to lead the department in March after President Trump removed Kristi Noem, has taken a more combative public posture, saying his agency would "pursue maximum pressure" on states and warning that local election officials who do not adequately respond to DHS findings "can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and, even depending on how far it goes, prison time." Mullin's confirmation drew opposition from Nevada's own delegation; Senator Catherine Cortez Masto voted against his nomination, saying at the time he had "no relevant experience" and would serve as "a rubber stamp" for the administration's immigration agenda.

The voter-roll push is one piece of a broader Justice Department campaign this year. The department's Civil Rights Division has sued dozens of states for declining to turn over statewide voter files, arguing federal law entitles it to inspect the records; courts have so far largely sided with the states.

Who is affected, and what comes next

Election officials in both parties say the immediate risk falls on eligible voters, particularly naturalized citizens whose paperwork can lag behind their status in federal databases. Pennsylvania's Secretary of the Commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has pushed back on the federal numbers as forcefully as his Democratic counterparts elsewhere, telling DHS he would not remove any voters without a defensible methodology. His office published its own registration data this month showing the state's rolls grew by a net 55,410 voters between January and early August through the state's normal, legally prescribed maintenance process, which Schmidt said is the actual safeguard against ineligible registrations rather than a one-time federal data dump.

For now, none of the four states has removed voters based on the DHS figures, and all say they are waiting on a complete accounting of names, data sources and matching methods before taking any action. DHS has not said when, or whether, it will provide one. With the four flagged states, along with much of the rest of the country, heading toward the 2026 midterm elections, the unresolved dispute leaves the administration's marquee claim about the scale of noncitizen voting unproven in public even as officials privately concede its numbers do not hold up, and leaves state election offices bracing for further federal pressure without the evidence they say they need to act on it.