Behind Texas’ Voter Citizenship Check Agreement with DHS
American Oversight obtained a previously unseen agreement that allows Texas to check voters’ citizenship statuses using a DHS immigration data service — and early drafts indicate a weakening of voter protections that risk disenfranchising eligible voters.
A Department of Homeland Security system that pulls information from immigration databases so government agencies can check individuals’ citizenship status has been greatly expanded under the Trump administration thanks to xenophobic lies about election fraud. Records obtained by American Oversight and reported on by the Texas Tribune detail an agreement between DHS and the Texas secretary of state for use of this service, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) — not only demonstrating the escalation of those lies, but also raising serious concerns that its use could disenfranchise eligible voters.
The secretary of state’s office entered an agreement with DHS in March allowing it to use SAVE, but the final signed agreement has not been made public until now. The records also include earlier drafts of the agreement that reveal significant changes, including several that appear to roll back key voter protections, as well as emails showing the office discussing ways to use SAVE with election officials in other states.
What Is SAVE?
SAVE is an online service that has been maintained by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for years to determine if legal immigrants are entitled to government benefits. To advance President Trump’s false and xenophobic claims about non-citizen voting, the service has recently been expanded to include information from the Social Security Administration about U.S. citizens, and election officials in multiple states have begun using SAVE to check voters’ citizenship.
The agreement was signed shortly before Trump signed an executive order directing DHS to provide all states free access to the expanded SAVE service. That same month, the Texas Senate passed a bill that would require people prove their citizenship before voting. Other states followed suit: Louisiana began using the expanded version of SAVE in May. Alabama entered an agreement with DHS in June and Indiana’s secretary of state announced it had entered a similar agreement a few weeks later.
Illegal voting by ineligible non-citizens is a federal crime and instances of voter fraud or non-citizens attempting to vote are incredibly rare, as has been proven by multiple state audits and examinations of voting data across the country. But Trump and election denial activists have been pushing false claims about non-citizen voting for years to advance the lie that our elections are not secure. These claims aren’t just politically useful — their repetition foments anti-immigrant sentiment and ultimately chills voter turnout, especially among people of color and naturalized citizens.
Texas’ Agreement with DHS
The records obtained by American Oversight include draft versions of the Texas secretary of state’s agreement with DHS that show officials weakened a requirement that voters believed to be non-citizens be provided notice and due process before any action is taken to limit their voting rights. In a series of edits, the words “right to vote” were removed and replaced with vague language about voter roll maintenance, and officials’ obligations to contact voters whose citizenship status cannot be verified by SAVE were diluted, limiting such outreach to “only if necessary” instead of requiring it in every case.
The weakening of basic due process provisions is especially alarming in light of the potential for error. The records also reveal that in May, the office attempted to use SAVE to check hundreds of voters’ citizenship, but encountered errors on nearly 20 percent of the records.
“We received three files from your user account,” wrote a USCIS official later that month, “the most recent of which consisted of 1,657 records to be verified, and it appears that we were able to process 1,374 of them, with the remaining 283 records throwing an error.”
Other records include emails from the Ohio secretary of state’s office, which reached out to Texas in January to discuss the SAVE system. The office followed up about the potential meeting in March, and requested time to discuss SAVE “as well as state to state voter data sharing.” Texas’ office offered a meeting time for later that day, but the records do not reflect whether it took place.
The expansion of the SAVE service for voter roll maintenance is yet another way the Trump administration has given its official endorsement to lies about widespread voter fraud. State officials’ promotion of SAVE exacerbates ill-founded mistrust of elections, and the increased use of the service risks disenfranchising eligible voters and endangering the personal information of millions of Americans.
The records outlined above demonstrate a dangerous weakening of basic due process protections that are critical to preserving the voting rights of those whose citizenship is questioned. Putting eligible voters at risk of disenfranchisement based on potentially unreliable data is what truly undermines election integrity and violates the very principles that our democracy depends on.