Texas is suing the government for not sharing non-citizen data

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration on Tuesday, accusing the federal government of failing to help Texas verify the citizenship status of some of the state’s registered voters — even though Paxton acknowledged that non-citizen voting is illegal and extremely rare be.

In the lawsuit, Paxton argued that the federal government has an obligation to assist states in verifying the citizenship status of registered voters and accused the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of failing to do so.

The lawsuit intensifies Paxton’s hunt for noncitizen voters just two weeks before the election and a day after early voting began in Texas. He has urged Texas Secretary of State Janet Nelson to ask the federal government to release data the state could use to cross-check its voter rolls.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Oct. 10 alerted Nelson to a program that it said would allow states to verify people’s naturalized or acquired citizenship status. Immigration officials have discussed back and forth with officials in several states about what data they can provide.

“The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program is the safest and most efficient way to reliably verify an individual’s citizenship or immigration status, including voter registration verification and/or voter roll maintenance,” says the agency’s director, Ur M. Jaddou, wrote to Nelson, adding that the agency “cannot offer an alternative procedure to any state at this time.”

The lawsuit, meanwhile, argued that the program “is not, in and of itself, an appropriate tool for a state that wishes to verify the citizenship status of an individual on the voter rolls.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paxton, along with Republicans across the country under the leadership of former President Donald Trump, have repeatedly raised and used unfounded concerns about non-citizens voting to stoke doubts about the integrity of the election.

Non-citizen voting is illegal under both federal and state law. Experts say non-citizen voting is extremely rare and that there is no evidence that it affects the election outcome.

In an Oct. 7 letter to USCIS requesting citizenship information, Paxton acknowledged that the vast majority of people whose citizenship status his office sought to confirm were eligible and lawful voters.

On October 2, Paxton requested that Nelson’s office provide him with a list of possible non-citizens registered to vote.

Nelson then shared voter information for anyone who does not have a Texas driver’s license or state ID number on file in his statewide voter registration system. She specifically warned that the records “do not reflect, nor in any way indicate, a list of potential non-U.S. citizens on the state’s voter rolls.”

Still, Paxton pointed out that the state has “no way of knowing” whether registered voters are actually not citizens and therefore ineligible to vote.

“The Biden-Harris administration has refused to comply with federal law, creating another obstacle for Texas to overcome in ensuring free and fair elections in our state,” Paxton said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Democrats have criticized the state Republican Party’s public crackdown on non-citizen voting as voter intimidation that could suppress eligible voters and undermine public confidence in the election results.

In late August, Gov. Greg Abbott boasted that the state had removed more than a million ineligible voters from its voter rolls, including 6,500 non-citizens – reinforcing Republicans’ baseless claims that non-citizens want to vote en masse to influence the election in favor of the Democrats.

A Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found that Abbott’s claims about non-citizens on the voter rolls were almost certainly exaggerated and, in some cases, false.