The Deportation Drive Keeps Pulling the Wrong Names From Government Files

In April 2025, the Treasury Department signed a memorandum letting the IRS share taxpayer records with immigration authorities, around a federal bar: data tied to individual taxpayer identification numbers — the tax IDs issued to people who have no Social Security number — may not be used for civil immigration enforcement ^[1][2]. Immigration authorities have since used the deal to seek the addresses of about 1.28 million taxpayers ^[2]. On June 10, 2025, the health department gave state Medicaid agencies 54 minutes to hand over the personal files of millions of enrollees, over its own officials' arguments that the transfer violated the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act ^[3]. And federal employees have been searching state voter registration databases, accessing them — according to a whistleblower's disclosure made public this month — by misrepresenting their identities as individual voters, on quotas of 40 individuals per shift ^[4]. When states refused to hand over the unredacted rolls, driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers included, the administration's own Justice Department sued: 29 states, plus the District of Columbia ^[5]. Each pipeline was premised on the same claim: noncitizens hiding in the government's own files. Each has now reported back. Around the pipelines, the enforcement campaign has changed shape. In August, DHS declared the containment phase complete — fifteen straight months, by the department's own count, without releasing a single migrant caught crossing the border, with apprehensions down 94 percent from the Biden-era monthly average ^[6]. After immigration agents shot and killed two American citizens in Minneapolis in January, the department paused warrantless home entries and stopped buying warehouses for mass detention; the president said the campaign could use a gentler hand ^[7]. It has retreated before. With the border phase declared done and the home raids on hold, the lists are where the deportation drive now lives. The lists have been reporting back all year. This month, the rulings joined them. The results first. The claim behind the voter search was 250,000 noncitizens registered across four states. Nevada's data has turned up 185 potential noncitizens, down from an initial estimate of 16,000 ^[8]. Homeland Security Investigations ran the names through a technology platform deployed over internal warnings that it would produce an "ungodly" number of false positives. The nationwide yield: a few dozen prosecutions, and fewer convictions ^[9]. The Medicaid reviews came back nearly empty — Pennsylvania and Colorado checked 79,000 names and found no ineligible enrollees at all, Texas terminated 77 of 28,000, Ohio 260 of 65,000 ^[10]. The IRS program is the least visible of the three. Of the 40,000 addresses the government requested through the deal, the IRS internally verified fewer than 3 percent, and the federal appeals court that reviewed the program this month counted 47,289 addresses actually moved ^[1][11]. And the misses run one direction. Of the names Ohio sent on to federal immigration authorities, 64,000 were already documented in state files as citizens or lawfully present ^[10]. The disclosure describes naturalized citizens flagged as noncitizens at the quota's arithmetic — 40 people a shift works out to twelve minutes a head ^[4]. Each of the three pipelines arrived with a promise attached. DHS answered the whistleblower's disclosure publicly, in full.

The Department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems. It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections. — U.S. Department of Homeland Security

The administration's own Justice Department is simultaneously in court suing 29 states and D.C. for the unredacted rolls, for the driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers that the public versions of the files do not carry ^[5]. The second promise has been aimed all year at the people in the country legally.

Those who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear. — U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Ohio's referrals sit on the other side of it, and so do the naturalized citizens the disclosure describes ^[10][4]. The administration has real markings on its side too. HHS's inspector general reviewed the Medicaid handover and rendered its judgment ^[3].

With respect to the recent data sharing between CMS and DHS, HHS acted entirely within its legal authority – and in full compliance with all applicable laws – to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved for individuals who are lawfully entitled to receive them. — Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

And in February, the D.C. Circuit let the IRS deal stand ^[2]. Until this month, the tally ran both ways. September has run one way. On the 5th, the same court blocked the administration's federal voter database ^[12]. On the 8th, it found the IRS program unlawful, unanimously. The addresses at issue, the panel found, had gone to ICE with placeholder entries like "00000" where real ones belonged, and with the former ICE director Todd Lyons listed as the point of contact on all 1.28 million requests — evidence, the court said, that no official was personally qualifying the criminal investigations the law requires ^[11]. Judge Cornelia Pillard had her own name for the Justice Department's defense.

The IRS is now on notice twice over regarding the legal inadequacies of its summer 2025 disclosures. — United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

On the 11th, three days after that ruling, the administration directed hundreds of DHS agents away from fraud cases and onto the state voter rolls, months after the same government pulled its agents off home raids following the Minneapolis killings ^[8][7]. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is accelerating its Sixth Circuit appeal of the Michigan voter-data case, in what election-law experts describe as a possible strategy to create a split between the nation's appeals courts and reach the Supreme Court before the November midterms ^[5]. Every court to rule on the administration's demands for state voter data has blocked them so far — Michigan in February, Massachusetts in April, New Jersey in July, the D.C. Circuit this month ^[12]. And on the 18th, the NAACP and other civil rights groups sued to block armed federal agents at polling stations, arguing that agents in the voting line, combined with a voter initiative that has mistaken naturalized citizens for noncitizens, would intimidate voters of color in violation of the Voting Rights Act ^[13]. The president has answered in his own terms.

I would do anything necessary to make sure the U.S. has honest elections. — Donald Trump

Whether that extends to immigration agents or the National Guard at the polls, he did not say. His homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, has described a narrower picture of what federal personnel would be doing there.

If there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation, we will, otherwise we won’t — Kash Patel

The department's official line is that ICE has nothing planned for the polls ^[13]. One more assurance sits in the disclosure, this one made to the officers rather than about them: DHS lawyers, it says, told the agents running the voter searches that they would face no personal liability ^[4]. On September 8, the panel that found the IRS program unlawful entered a different view of what government personnel face.

The government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information. — United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

That is the opposite of the assurance the disclosure describes. The panel also granted standing to sue to people deported through the IRS transfer ^[11]. That leaves two tests the calendar has already set, side by side. One arrives with the November voters: whether armed federal agents appear at the polls under the NAACP's Voting Rights Act challenge, in electorates that include naturalized citizens the searches flagged as noncitizens at the quota's twelve minutes a head ^[13][4]. The pipelines' parallel error never reaches a voting booth at all: the Ohio names sent on to federal authorities that state files had already shown to be citizens or lawful residents ^[10]. And between the two sits the officer who filled those quotas, forty people a shift, told by department lawyers, the disclosure says, that none of it would come back on him ^[4].