Federal law enforcement devoted tremendous resources in a quixotic attempt to find non-citizen voters.
Instead of investigating serious crimes, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents are trying, and failing, to find evidence to justify President Donald Trump’s false stolen election claims.
“Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement,” ProPublica reported last week.
HSI, a division within the Department of Homeland Security, was created to combat cross-border criminal enterprises. ProPublica interviewed current and former HSI agents for its report, “Inside Trump’s Failed Hunt for Noncitizen Voters,” by journalists Peter Elkind, Jen Fifield, Doug Bock Clark, Ken B. Morales and Andy Mannix. The report details how federal officers meant to keep us safe from drug lords and terrorists were reassigned to Trump’s personal obsession with losing the 2020 election, and in the process ignored privacy protections and civil liberty protections.
Illegal voting is extremely rare. According to the Justice Department’s own data, ProPublica found, only 41 people were charged with election-related crimes between January 2025 and May 2026. That’s roughly 0.000026% of the voting population, or one in every 3.8 million voters, nowhere near enough to swing an election.
Another striking part of the report is the Keystone Cops atmosphere of these investigations. These officers haven’t been trained on election laws and processes, so they end up bumbling through, not understanding the data they have. The result is a lot of false positives.
Read the whole report here.
If you have a friend or family member who believes the stolen election claims, keep this in mind: election process issues and illegal voting are two separate things. Finding an election process problem, of which there are many, is not evidence of a stolen election.
For instance, last month New Jersey revealed that a vendor’s software error had mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024. There was no criminal intent and roughly 400 of them voted. This is a major process failure. While NJ officials found and fixed the problem, they didn’t reveal it to the public until two years later. Our government officials should be held accountable, but it’s not evidence of a stolen election.
It’s also helpful to step back and think about the big picture. The false stolen election conspiracy claims that the Democrat Party imported large numbers of undocumented immigrants so they would illegally vote for Democrats and help them steal an election. This claim is based on a couple false premises. First, if you’re an immigrant who entered the country illegally, you don’t want the government to find you. Showing up at an election booth puts you in jeopardy of getting caught. Why put yourself at risk when your one vote won’t make the difference in an election? Second, it assumes that immigrants will automatically vote Democrat. We know that’s not true. Many immigrants are quite conservative, actually, and have no love for the Democrat Party, especially on social issues.
More Good Reads
Amy Black: “Christian Political Engagement in Divisive Times”
Political participation provides a way—not the only way, but an important one nonetheless—for Christians to live out the great commandments to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Given the possibilities to serve the common good, Christians should participate in government, educate themselves on political issues, and advocate for policies they think best.
At the same time, we need to acknowledge that politics is messy, and government is fallen and broken (just like everything in the world, including us). Political solutions are necessarily imperfect and, at best, temporarily achieving partial goals. Ultimately, public policy involves a lot of trial and error, attempting one fix to a problem, seeing how well it works (or doesn’t work), and then trying something new. Sometimes government programs can help; other times solutions may be best found with families, churches, and community organizations.
NYT: “Colorado Was Targeted as Trump Fumed Over Election Denier, Email Shows”
The goal, outlined in an email sent to officials at five federal agencies, was to “prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” the assistant, Emily Underwood, wrote on Dec. 15.
“Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” Ms. Underwood added.
The next day, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.
State officials say the email, which was revealed in a federal court hearing on Tuesday, is the clearest evidence yet that the Trump administration marshaled government resources to retaliate against Colorado over its use of mail-in ballots and its conviction of Ms. Peters, a county clerk who was found guilty in a plot to tamper with voting machines after the 2020 election.
PsyPost: “Doomscrolling political news during your downtime predicts reduced engagement at work”
Consuming political news outside of work is associated with how employees feel and behave once they clock in. A recent study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior indicates that reading or watching negative political media tends to predict higher anxiety and lower work engagement, whereas consuming positive political content predicts increased hope and helpfulness on the job. These findings suggest that the emotional weight of our daily news diets carries over into the workplace and shapes our professional lives.
