Markwayne Mullin traded DHS credibility for a political headline

By Adele Rutherford · Reporting from Atlanta · September 15, 2026

The law is not a suggestion, and "investigative purpose" is not a magic wand that vanishes state statutes.

The law is not a suggestion, and an "investigative purpose" does not grant a license to ignore state statutes. When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launches an operation that requires its agents to lie to state governments to access voter rolls, it is no longer conducting an investigation. It is stealing the trust of the public.

Secretary Markwayne Mullin describes the "Unlawful Voter Initiative" as a tool for election security. But NPR and The Guardian reported that the process relies on skipped steps and legal delusions. According to a whistleblower represented by the Democracy Defenders Fund, leadership instructed federal agents to use Social Security numbers and birth dates to bypass state security measures. In Virginia, for instance, the state website requires a digital oath: the person accessing the record must be the voter or have their express authorization. The whistleblower said DHS leadership directed agents to click that box and lie, effectively ordering federal employees to commit computer fraud under the guise of federal duty.

Can a citizen's status be decided in twelve minutes?

The stopwatch reveals the truth. Leadership set quotas for officers of at least five subjects per hour, or forty per day. This gives agents roughly twelve minutes per person to decide if a resident is a U.S. citizen or an "unlawful voter."

In appellate law, this is a failure of the record. An agent cannot correctly decide a person's legal status in twelve minutes using unreliable data. The results prove the failure. In Nevada, only one in 86 people DHS flagged as non-citizens actually held that status. This is not a "laser focus" on criminality; it is a dragnet designed to produce a high number rather than the truth.

The government has a history of skipping steps to reach a desired result. In 2006, the USCIS citizenship test controversy showed a federal government eager to use tight readings of the law to narrow the gates of citizenship. Here, the DHS is doing the opposite: casting a wider dragnet to create a federal record in the "Tecs" database—a law enforcement repository used to track arrivals and departures—against thousands of residents based on uncorroborated data. When the government creates a law enforcement record without a factual basis, it is not securing an election; it is filling a digital file with unproven accusations.

The Open-Source Alibi

Secretary Mullin’s office offered a dismissive response. A DHS spokesperson said the process is "not rocket science" and that the agency is simply cross-referencing public data. The Office of Chief Counsel at USCIS said the agency is conducting "open-source research."

The government argues that federal immigration mandates override state digital checkboxes. They claim the goal of stopping non-citizen voting is so paramount that lying on a state website is a minor technicality that should not obstruct federal law.

That argument fails because it ignores the nature of the tool. A rule that only works while one party holds power is not a rule; it is a preference. If federal agents can lie to state systems whenever they believe the "national interest" is at stake, the rule of law vanishes. The public discovered this same logic during the 2013 NSA surveillance scandal, where the government justified spying on millions of innocent people by citing the urgency of a threat.

DHS is reviving the COINTELPRO playbook

The agency is reviving the methods of COINTELPRO. While the targets and the technology have changed, the operation follows the same path: using federal badges and databases to target immigrant communities and disrupt political processes under the cover of "national security." COINTELPRO did not just surveil; it sought to discredit and neutralize. By creating thousands of "Tecs" records based on unreliable data, DHS is building an invisible file on voters that agents can use to intimidate or disenfranchise them long after the November elections end.

This follows a pattern of gathering data we saw in 2019, when the Trump administration used Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to deploy drones and data-mining against specific neighborhoods. The goal is not the small handful of actual illegal voters in Nevada; the goal is the atmosphere of suspicion created by thousands of false leads.

Senator Alex Padilla and Senator Chuck Schumer are right to demand this initiative stop, though they are fighting a fire that has already done its damage. State attorneys general in California and Virginia will likely sue to protect their computer crime laws, and Congressional committees will subpoena the internal memos that told agents they would not be personally liable for breaking the law.

Legitimacy is a resource that spends fast and refills slowly. By instructing agents to lie to the states to "secure" the vote, Markwayne Mullin has traded the long-term credibility of the Department of Homeland Security for a short-term political headline. He has taught a generation of federal agents that the law is a hurdle to be bypassed rather than a boundary to be respected. When the government treats the law as an obstacle to its goals, it ceases to be a government and becomes a faction.

Markwayne Mullin traded DHS credibility for a political headline

Can a citizen's status be decided in twelve minutes?

The Open-Source Alibi

DHS is reviving the COINTELPRO playbook

Sources