As the Trump administration wages a war against foreign nationals daring to vote in American elections, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joseph Edlow has spearheaded game-changing policy reforms to root them out.
When President Donald Trump returned to office, he quickly signed an executive order to strengthen the citizenship verification process and help keep foreign nationals from participating in American elections. USCIS, the federal agency that administers legal immigration, has since streamlined resources for elected leaders to better identify and remove noncitizens from their state’s voter rolls.
Edlow — who now leads an agency of more than 20,000 people tasked with managing the country’s immigration system — says they’re just getting started.
“We’re already more secure in elections than we were six months ago,” Edlow said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “My goal is have our next election, the midterms, be one of the most secure elections in American history.”
The Senate confirmed Edlow as director of USCIS in July, and he began leading the agency shortly afterward. Formerly serving as deputy director for policy and chief counsel at the agency during the first Trump administration, Edlow is now at the forefront of the White House’s efforts to totally eradicate foreign influence in U.S. elections.
Trump set the pace on voter integrity reform in March when he signed Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” an order that bolsters the citizenship verification process and prohibits foreigners from interfering in U.S. elections. The order additionally directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent department of USCIS, to offer the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database free of charge to every state to protect election integrity.
SAVE is an online service administered by USCIS that allows various government agencies to verify the immigration status or U.S. naturalization of applicants seeking benefits or licenses. State officials cracking down on voter fraud have said access to the database has turbocharged their efforts.
“Gaining access to this database has been a game-changer,” Republican Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson said in June. “Not only have we been able to identify individuals who should not have voted in the last election, we have also been able to confirm naturalization of dozens more.”
Nelson’s comments were in reaction to the discovery of 33 potential noncitizens who voted in the 2024 presidential election in Texas. Since that announcement, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton revealed that over 100 suspected noncitizens are believed to have cast more than 200 ballots in the 2022 and 2020 election cycles.
“[The SAVE] system, while it initially was used for benefits granting agencies to determine whether someone was eligible for public benefits, it has really been used for this purpose now, and we’ve modernized it to allow secretaries of state and other election officials to batch audit large group, a large, large group of records to determine whether someone is eligible to register to vote,” Edlow said to the DCNF.
In May, USCIS put SAVE’s usefulness into overdrive by partnering with the Social Security Administration to ensure a reliable source for verifying immigration status and American citizenship. Under the update, local and state officials are now able to input Social Security numbers for verification of American citizenship and prevent foreign nationals from voting in American elections.
More specifically, the new partnership allows government agencies to create cases in SAVE using an applicant’s Social Security number rather than a DHS identifying number, which is not collected by a majority of state and local agencies, according to Edlow. For the first time, agencies are now able to submit more than one case at a time, which has streamlined the process.
“We have now an agreement with the Social Security Administration whereby you can use a nine digit social security number and we can return hits for you to determine whether someone is a citizen or not, for voter verification purposes,” Edlow said.
“And we’re continuing to improve it, we’re constantly testing it,” the USCIS director went on. “We’re looking to go down from the full nine to the last four of the social with that yet, but we’re going to get there soon.”
When government officials have identified noncitizens who allegedly participated in a federal U.S. election, the Trump administration hasn’t hesitated to throw the book.
Federal prosecutors charged two Ukrainian nationals in April with unlawfully voting in the 2024 presidential election and, in that same month, charged a 45-year-old Iraqi national of illegally voting in the 2020 presidential election. In May, federal prosecutors revealed that a Colombian illegal migrant lived in the U.S. for decades under a stolen identity and voted in the 2024 presidential election, along with allegedly stealing around roughly $400,000 in rental assistance, Social Security and food stamp benefits
It can be hard to quantify how many noncitizens have potentially voted in past U.S. elections. Michigan officials in October charged a Chinese national of voting in the 2024 election — but only after he reached out to his local clerk’s office and asked if he could get his ballot back. That Chinese man fled the country one day before Trump returned to office.
In addition to cracking down on foreign nationals who’ve voted in elections, the Trump administration has also put the pressure on localities not doing enough to keep them off the voter rolls.
In June, federal prosecutors rolled out a lawsuit against Orange County, California, for allegedly not handing over all documentation proving election officials are actively removing noncitizens from their voter registration lists. A month prior, the administration sued North Carolina and its Board of Elections for allegedly failing to maintain a voter registration list compliant with federal laws.
While the Trump administration continues its crackdown, the director of USCIS says his office will keep improving the SAVE database and election integrity as a whole.
“As things pop up, we’re going to make changes, and we’re going to make this a better system,” Edlow said. “The worst SAVE is ever going to be is the way that you see it today, because every day we are making more improvements to it.”
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