DHS email pairing non-English voting jurisdictions with a prosecution checklist raises alarm

An internal Department of Homeland Security email has surfaced showing that agency officials compiled a 78-page list of counties and states that provide election materials in languages other than English and shared it internally alongside a Justice Department checklist outlining requirements for prosecuting voter-fraud cases, according to documents obtained through a federal records lawsuit and reported Thursday by NPR. The disclosure has intensified concerns among voting-rights advocates that the administration's expanding hunt for noncitizen voters could translate into enforcement activity concentrated in Latino, Asian American and Native American communities ahead of the November midterms.

The email, dated Dec. 19, 2025, was sent by an official in DHS's border policy office to Rob Law, the department's undersecretary for strategy, policy and plans, with Heather Honey — who is leading the administration's noncitizen-voting initiative — and other officials copied. It was released in heavily redacted form as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the Democratic National Committee filed against the Justice, Homeland Security and Defense departments after the agencies failed to respond to records requests about potential federal deployments at polling places. In court filings defending the redactions, DHS described the email only as "a subordinate sharing initial thoughts and opinions with leadership," and it remains unclear why the list of multilingual jurisdictions was attached to a document about criminal referrals.

The numbers behind the dispute

The jurisdictions on the list are those covered under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires local election offices to provide ballots and materials in a non-English language when more than 5 percent of voting-age citizens in that jurisdiction primarily speak it — a threshold determined periodically by the Census Bureau under its Section 203 language determinations, which most recently identified more than 300 covered counties and municipalities nationwide. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission's guidance on language-access requirements notes that coverage spans Spanish, Asian-language and Native American and Alaska Native communities in states including Texas, California, New York and Arizona.

The email surfaced as DHS presses a separate, larger effort to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls. The department has told California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that it has flagged more than 250,000 potential noncitizen registrations across the four states combined, including roughly 14,576 in Pennsylvania alone. But Pennsylvania officials have disputed the reliability of that methodology, noting DHS acknowledged it did not use Social Security numbers or other unique identifiers and instead matched names, birth dates, phone numbers and addresses against immigration records, producing matches DHS's own representatives at one point described as lacking "high confidence." A survey released this month by the University of California San Diego found that 40 percent of voters nationally believe immigration agents are likely to be present at their polling place this fall, including 45 percent of Hispanic respondents, 44 percent of Black respondents and 41 percent of Asian American respondents, compared with 33 percent of white respondents.

How the fight over noncitizen voting escalated

The email is the latest development in a monthslong campaign by DHS to root out noncitizen voting, an occurrence that election-integrity audits have consistently found to be rare. The push accelerated after Kristi Noem's tenure as secretary and continued under Markwayne Mullin, who was sworn in as homeland security secretary in March. DHS has separately sought to revive the use of its SAVE database — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system ordinarily used to confirm immigration status for benefits eligibility — to screen state voter rolls, after a federal court found in June that doing so violated federal privacy law; the administration has since asked the Supreme Court to let the practice resume before November.

Mullin has also said publicly that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could appear at polling sites under certain circumstances. "The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down," he told reporters earlier this month, adding that "ICE isn't there to patrol the polling places." Federal law separately bars armed officials from being present at polling locations without specific legal authority, and DHS said in response to the newly disclosed email that it "is not planning operations targeting polling locations" and that anyone who breaks the law should not be able to "use a purported lack of knowledge" of English to escape prosecution.

Who could be affected

Voting-rights lawyers say the pairing of the language-access list with a prosecution checklist, even if unintentional, lands amid an atmosphere already primed for confusion in immigrant and language-minority communities. Denver, a Section 203 jurisdiction with substantial Spanish-speaking and other immigrant populations, appears on the list disclosed in the email. Paul López, Denver's top election official and a plaintiff in a separate lawsuit over federal agents at polling places, said the reporting on the DHS document reinforced why his office has been preparing contingency plans for the fall election.

"It is illegal for folks to be targeted on the basis of their language," López said. "Don't let these thugs scare you. You're not going to be bullied and we're not going to be intimidated."

Dan Freeman, the DNC's litigation director and a former Justice Department voting-section attorney, said the document's contents raised an obvious question about intent. "The very simple connection that I logically drew is that they're targeting" jurisdictions where ballots are printed in languages other than English, he said, adding that combining that data with a prosecution checklist suggested those communities could become a focus for federal election-crime referrals.

What happens next

The DNC's underlying FOIA case remains active in federal court in Washington, and attorneys involved say additional documents from the same records request are still being processed and could surface before Election Day. The Supreme Court has not yet acted on the administration's request to revive DHS's use of the SAVE database for voter-roll screening, a decision that could arrive within weeks given the approaching Nov. 3 midterms. Pennsylvania and Nevada officials say they are still waiting for DHS to turn over the full underlying data behind its noncitizen-voter claims so state election offices can independently verify the matches before removing anyone from the rolls. Civil rights groups, meanwhile, say they will continue seeking assurances — through litigation and public records requests — that federal agents will stay away from polling places in November, particularly in the language-minority communities named in the December email.