DHS Says a Quarter-Million Noncitizens May Be on the Rolls in 4 States. Less Than Half Are an ‘Exact Match.’
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R) sent letters dated July 10 to the chief election officials of California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, telling them a data-matching review had turned up what could be more than 256,000 noncitizens registered to vote across the four states combined. Fox News Digital obtained the letters and published the story July 16 — DHS itself has not issued a public release.
The number is real, in the sense that it’s the number DHS wrote in its own letters. What DHS also wrote, in the same letters, is that this is a “preliminary review,” and that fewer than half of the 256,463 records — 118,003, about 46 percent — are what DHS calls an “exact match” on name, date of birth, address, and Social Security number. The rest is a broader estimate DHS’s letters don’t explain.
That gap matters, because it’s not the only one. Three months ago DHS put its own national count of potential noncitizen registrants at 24,000. The new letters claim more than ten times that — from four states alone.
- 256,463total claimedcombined preliminary estimate across CA, NJ, NV, and PA — per DHS letters obtained by Fox News Digital
- 118,003exact match (46%)the subset DHS matched on all four identifiers — name, DOB, address, and SSN — the rest is a broader, unexplained estimate
- 24,000DHS's own count, April 2026DHS's prior national total for potential noncitizen registrants — roughly 10x smaller than the new 4-state claim
- June 22, 2026SAVE database enjoineda D.C. federal judge blocked DHS's revamped citizenship-verification tool nationwide — still in effect when the July 10 letters went out
The four letters, sent to California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania on Friday, July 10, 2026, describe a data-matching exercise: DHS compared publicly available voter registration records against federal immigration data, using Social Security numbers as one of several identifiers. The per-state breakdown, as reported by Fox News Digital from the letters:
California: up to 190,832 preliminary; 81,336 exact match.
New Jersey: up to 35,152 preliminary; 19,497 exact match.
Nevada: up to 15,903 preliminary; 8,576 exact match.
Pennsylvania: up to 14,576 preliminary; 8,594 exact match.
Mullin framed the stakes plainly. The letters ask each state to contact DHS by July 24, 2026 so the department can begin sharing records and assisting with identity verification — explicitly before any state takes action on the numbers, not after.
“Allowing just one non-citizen to vote cancels the vote of one U.S. citizen. Ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections is essential to protecting election integrity.”
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R) · letters to CA, NJ, NV, PA · July 10, 2026
As recently as April 23, 2026, DHS put its own nationwide estimate of potential noncitizen registrants at roughly 24,000, across every state that had cooperated with its review at the time. The new letters claim more than ten times that figure — 256,463 — from four states alone. Neither the letters nor DHS’s public statements explain the jump.
One likely factor the letters never mention by name: SAVE, DHS’s standard citizenship-verification database. A revamped version of SAVE has been blocked nationwide since June 22, 2026, when U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan (D.C., a Biden appointee) ruled it unlawfully exposed Social Security data and risked wrongly flagging eligible voters. A separate, conflicting ruling from a Florida federal judge ordered SAVE access restored for four different, Republican-led states (Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa) under an earlier settlement. Both rulings stood on July 10 when Mullin’s letters went out; the letters don’t say which tool, or which legal authority, actually produced the 256,463 figure. That ambiguity is itself a fact worth reporting, not a gap this story is filling in with a guess.
Preliminary data-matching claims like this one have a documented track record of shrinking under scrutiny — not because noncitizen registration never happens, but because cross-matching immigration and voter databases is genuinely error-prone. In Louisiana, a SAVE-based review flagged 403 of 2.96 million registered voters, or 0.014 percent. In Missouri, an audit comparing 7.9 million driving records against 7.2 million active registrations found a similar pattern of shrinkage under review: St. Louis County’s initial list of 691 potential noncitizens dropped to 133 after a January revision, and in Boone County, election officials discovered more than half the voters flagged as noncitizens were actually citizens — including one man whose own registration helper had signed him up at his naturalization ceremony.
Naturalization lag: the Social Security Administration’s database often doesn’t reflect a person’s naturalization unless they separately notified SSA — so a citizen who naturalized years ago can still show up as a noncitizen in a federal cross-match.
Formatting mismatches: inconsistent name, date-of-birth, or gender formatting across state and federal databases produces false non-matches and false matches alike.
DHS's own admission: the department has acknowledged giving at least five states incorrect SAVE information during the tool's rushed 2025–26 expansion.
The nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, which has tracked these claims across multiple states, put it bluntly: initial DHS-style estimates are “almost certain to be a misleading overestimation” of the real number, and tend to be “revised significantly downward after proper investigation.” None of that proves the 256,463 figure is wrong. It does mean the number DHS wrote in a letter six days before this story published has not been independently verified by anyone — not a court, not a wire service, not the states themselves.
The four states named skew Democratic-leaning at the top of the ticket, but the actual line-up of officials who received the letters resists a simple “four blue states” framing. California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D), New Jersey’s Dale Caldwell (D), and Nevada’s Francisco Aguilar (D) are Democrats — but Nevada’s governor, Joe Lombardo (R), is a Republican. Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth, Al Schmidt (R), is a Republican appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro specifically for his cross-party credibility defending the 2020 election results. None of the four had responded to DHS’s letter as of this story’s publication.
A separate, higher-stakes federal action is running on its own clock in the same window. On July 7, Trump DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent letters to all 50 states — not just the four in DHS’s letters — warning that election officials who “knowingly” retain noncitizens on the rolls could face federal criminal liability. That DOJ letter and DHS’s data-matching letters are two different actions from two different agencies; conflating them overstates what either one has actually established. Schmidt’s office has already responded to the DOJ letter, saying it takes the underlying concern “seriously” but will make no changes to Pennsylvania’s 2026 election administration.
Every state and local election official is on notice – knowingly encouraging noncitizens to vote or conspiring to fraudulently register noncitizens is a federal crime...
DHS told four states it found up to 256,463 potentially noncitizen registered voters — a real claim, in a real letter, from the federal government's own election-integrity effort. DHS also called it a preliminary review, put an exact match on fewer than half those records, and produced a number roughly ten times its own count from three months ago, using a methodology it doesn't name at a moment when its main verification tool is under a federal injunction. Both of those things are the story. Report the claim; don't launder the caveats out of it.
