Senior Department of Homeland Security officials told Nevada election administrators last week that the Trump administration had not verified its claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens are illegally registered to vote in the state, and had identified only 185 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, according to emails and a video recording obtained by MS NOW.

The department had yet to review more than 14,000 additional names as of Aug. 20, according to the material, which Nevada’s secretary of state released in response to a public records request.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that the Trump administration found more than 250,000 “potential” noncitizens on voter rolls across four states, including 15,903 unlawfully registered in Nevada. He threatened to prosecute election officials if they did not hand over sensitive voter data. The department has since identified 185 potential noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls.

“The documents [and] the lists you spoke of — are we able to get those either now or perhaps immediately following the call?” asked Mark A. Wlaschin, Nevada’s deputy secretary of state for elections, regarding the administration’s claimed list of noncitizen voters.

“We’re not finished going through the voter roll for Nevada, so we wouldn’t have a full and complete list,” said Kimberley Vogt, the fraud division chief with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “We’re going to manually review to be sure that it is not someone’s dad or someone’s son and that it is that person. Then we’re reducing the list down to what is a confirmed match. We intend to send you guys a list of the ones that we’ve confirmed and they do not appear to be a citizen.”

Murphy Hebert, the chief deputy in the Nevada secretary of state’s office, responded, “So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted, basically? It’s the number that you are starting [with].”

“It hasn’t had a full manual review of each one,” Vogt responded, in part. “It’s a lot of work to go one by one, I’m sure you can imagine.” 

Paul Gleason, who works in the fraud division of USCIS, told the Nevada officials that the federal government used data from publicly available voter files in the state, and sought to match them with USCIS records to create a list of potential noncitizens. 

“Do you have a rough timeline for when we might be able to receive that information? I mean, given the close proximity not only to Election Day itself but to mail ballots [being sent],” Wlaschin asked.

DHS said on the call that its review of voters is ongoing, but it has not shared a full list with the state, making it difficult for the state to verify any of its information. In email exchanges just this week, state officials continued to press for names and addresses for registered voters so that they could verify the administration’s claims.  

“Weeks after the President held a national, primetime speech making sweeping claims regarding noncitizens and the security of our elections, DHS representatives informed our office that the numbers that were provided to the public are preliminary and that there is not high enough confidence to be able to share the full dataset with Nevada officials,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said in a statement to MS NOW. “The Secretary of State’s Office will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters and ripping away their Constitutional right to vote without the highest confidence of their ineligibility.”

In a statement to MS NOW after this article was published, an unidentified spokesperson for DHS disputed this reporting. “This is false,” said the spokesperson. “The 185 are the individuals that had gone through manual review. The list shared with Nevada also included 6,218 other individuals with the highest number of matching attributes. This was at the request of NV. They wanted to start with a subset less than the 15,903.”

Trump and the White House have claimed — without substantiation — that noncitizen voting could sway the outcome of U.S. elections, and have directed federal agents across DHS to look for noncitizen voter fraud. 

Multiple state election administrators told MS NOW that they are concerned the Trump administration will seek to use claims about noncitizen registered voters to interfere with the November elections — potentially seeking to seize ballots or tabulation machines through a search warrant or an attempted declaration of a national emergency by Trump.

Among the DHS officials on the call was Heather Honey, who identified herself in the meeting as a senior counselor to Mullin. In March 2025, Honey suggested the president should declare a “national emergency” ahead of the midterm elections to address claims of fraudulent voting, The New York Times has reported. Months later, Trump appointed her DHS’ deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, a role in which she has steered department resources toward searching for noncitizens on voter rolls or evidence of voter fraud.

Prior to joining the administration, Honey led the Pennsylvania chapter of the Election Integrity Network — an umbrella group for state-level election activists who fought the certification of the 2020 election. That national organization is helmed by Cleta Mitchell, who advised Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 result and organized a remote White House briefing in July for election conspiracy theorists about declassified election material.

“The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections, except that where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States — as I think we can establish, with the porous system that we have,” Mitchell said last year on a talk radio program. “Then I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”

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