WASHINGTON — Civic plaintiffs opened a federal case here Thursday against Homeland Security, saying the department quietly assembled a vast store of Americans registration files from nearly every state.
The suit in D.C. federal court comes from a voting-rights membership network, a digital-privacy research center and a Latino civil-rights federation. They want judges to freeze the collection effort, bar further use or sharing of the material, and force deletion of what already sits in federal hands.
Their papers say agents pulled state rolls that can carry Social Security digits, driver license numbers, birth dates, home addresses, ballot history and party labels, then layered on purchased commercial profiles. The groups argue the project targets supposed noncitizen voting without clear legal power to stockpile the nation electorate.
Documents cited in the case show that by June 2026, Homeland Security Investigations had taken in about 50.6 million records routed through Justice and about 48.4 million more from other channels, covering most of the country roughly 174 million registered voters across at least 47 states.
The filing also flags false alarms, including a Nevada episode where federal officials first flagged nearly 16,000 people as noncitizen registrants, later cut the count to 185, and state reviewers concluded every person on the trimmed list was a citizen.
The same week, Justice sued California election officials over a list of about 20,000 names labeled likely noncitizens and asked a judge to hold their mail ballots. State officials said they had only two days to check the names without seeing the method behind them. Homeland Security had no immediate reply to the privacy case.
