ICE agents obtained individual voter registration files directly from county election officials in Texas and North Carolina, the first confirmed instance of federal investigators accessing local voter data as part of the Trump administration's push to identify and prosecute noncitizen voting.
Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE's investigative arm, pulled the files from Webb County, Texas and Forsyth County, North Carolina, according to emails obtained through public records requests and reported by Axios on June 13, with parallel reporting the same day from the Washington Examiner. The emails were shared with Axios by Democracy Forward. They show an HSI criminal analyst first contacting the Texas Secretary of State's general counsel in April, asking what voter information was available and what subpoenas would be required to obtain it. By May, agents had received individual voter registration files directly from Webb County officials.
Webb County Election Administrator Jose Castillo told Axios he has seen two cases of a noncitizen voting in four years across a jurisdiction with more than 150,000 registered voters. "There's nothing there," Castillo said of the investigation. He also said the HSI outreach was the first of its kind he had received, and he directed the agency to submit formal public records requests for any future data rather than approaching his office directly.
In Forsyth County, a separate HSI agent requested registration records for two specific voters from county officials last November, and the county complied, according to Axios.
Neither county has confirmed prosecution referrals from the file pulls, and the administration has not publicly named any investigation target from either jurisdiction.
The county-level operations fit squarely into a broader directive. On June 9, just days before this story broke, DHS General Counsel James Percival issued guidance directing ICE to pursue stricter penalties for noncitizens found voting illegally, including deportation. The direct approach to county offices, bypassing state-level channels and the standard public records process, marks a more aggressive step than previous administration memos, which signaled intent without documenting agents actually receiving voter files.
The administration has been working parallel tracks as well. Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson referred 33 names of potential noncitizens who voted in the November 2024 general election to state Attorney General Ken Paxton's office for criminal investigation, according to state records. ICE separately arrested a noncitizen this year accused of casting ballots in seven federal elections, with federal charges pending, as Fox News reported. None of that had yet involved federal agents going directly to county election administrators for individual registration data. The Webb County and Forsyth County file pulls are the first confirmed instance.
Scale, Pushback, and What Comes Next
The confirmed scale of noncitizen voting nationally remains limited. The Heritage Foundation has documented roughly 100 confirmed cases across the country between 1982 and 2025. Webb County's own administrator put his local tally at two over four years. For supporters of the investigation, that low number is exactly the argument for this kind of scrutiny: fraud that is never investigated never gets counted. Critics see the disproportion as the story itself.
Democracy Docket, the progressive voting-rights litigation group that obtained many of the underlying records, called the direct county outreach a troubling precedent, arguing that approaching election administrators without a formal subpoena bypasses legal protections built around voter registration data.
The administration has not disclosed how many other counties may have received similar outreach from HSI agents, and it remains unclear whether Webb County and Forsyth County are isolated early contacts or the opening phase of a coordinated sweep. With the midterms five months out, that answer matters. If prosecution referrals follow from either county, or if HSI outreach surfaces in additional states before November, the full scope of this operation will come into focus fast.
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