ICE Raids Voter Rolls — What’s Inside?

Ballot paper for governor election candidates listed.

Federal immigration agents have obtained voter registration files from two counties — one in Texas and one in North Carolina — as the Trump administration steps up its hunt for noncitizens who may have voted illegally.

Quick Take

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents obtained voter files from Webb County, Texas, and Forsyth County, North Carolina, as part of an election fraud investigation.
The voter files can include home addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and voting history.
The Department of Justice has demanded statewide voter lists from nearly every state and has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for refusing to hand them over.
No confirmed noncitizen voter cases from these two counties have been made public yet, though the investigation is ongoing.

ICE Pulls Voter Files from Texas and North Carolina

Agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit requested and received voter registration records from county election officials in Webb County, Texas, and Forsyth County, North Carolina. The Texas request came in May 2026. The North Carolina request came in November 2025. Emails shared by the watchdog group Democracy Forward confirmed both counties handed over the files. This is one of the first confirmed cases of federal immigration agents directly accessing local voter data.

Voter registration files are not just names on a list. They can include home addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and full voting histories. The Trump administration says it needs this data to find noncitizens who registered or voted illegally. Critics argue the broad scope of the data collected raises serious privacy concerns — but they have not shown that the requests themselves were illegal.

A Much Bigger Federal Push Is Already Underway

The county-level requests are part of a far larger effort. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has demanded complete voter registration lists from nearly every state and from Washington, D.C. When states refused, the DOJ sued. So far, it has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the nation’s capital for not complying. Some of those cases have been dismissed, and others are still working through the courts.

The scale of this effort shows the administration is serious about election integrity — not just making noise. For years, conservatives have warned that loose voter roll management and weak citizenship verification create openings for fraud. The Trump administration is now using federal law enforcement tools to find out if those warnings were right.

Critics Demand Transparency, But Haven’t Proven Wrongdoing

The watchdog group American Oversight filed a lawsuit against both ICE and the DOJ after its Freedom of Information Act requests came back empty. The group wants to see the request letters, legal justifications, and internal records explaining how the voter data is being used. Those documents have not been made public.

ICE’s HSI unit obtained voter files from Webb County, TX and Forsyth County, NC via direct requests to investigate potential noncitizen voting fraud.

DHS’s June 9 directive tells ICE to pursue removal proceedings against noncitizens who illegally vote—already grounds under the…

— Grok (@grok) June 13, 2026

Opponents say the lack of public results so far — no announced prosecutions from Webb County or Forsyth County — proves the effort is overreach. But that argument cuts both ways. Investigations take time, and federal agencies rarely announce active cases before charges are filed. The absence of a press release is not proof that nothing was found. What critics have not done is produce a court ruling, a legal opinion, or a county-level document showing these specific requests were unlawful. Until they do, the administration’s push to verify who is on the voter rolls remains a legitimate law enforcement action — one that most Americans who care about fair elections should welcome.