Government’s Response to FOIA Request Also Outlines Role Played by Heather Honey, 2020 Election Denier

October 8, 2026 - Washington, D.C. — Following a request filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Democracy Forward has obtained records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) that outline how the principal criminal investigative arm of the agency is using the power of the government to try to silence eligible voters and prevent them from accessing the ballot. The records also outline the role played by Heather Honey, noted 2020 election denier and now senior advisor to the ICE Director and senior counsel to the DHS Secretary. 

Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

The newly delivered records show that ICE HSI obtained 48.4 million records from Heather Honey’s “independent sources of information” as a “strategic line of effort” to pursue voter fraud investigations. 

The records were provided to Democracy Forward in response to a FOIA request submitted by the watchdog group in April 2026 regarding ICE’s role in the upcoming midterm elections and voting. In response, the agency provided a 166-page production containing a series of weekly reports purporting to demonstrate fraudulent voting activities that were shared with ICE leadership, among other documents, to continue the false narrative about ongoing fraud. 

“The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections. It appears the president and his allies want to pick their voters, as opposed to the way things are supposed to function in a democracy where voters pick their leaders,” said Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward. “If not for the laws that protect the public’s right to know what their government is doing, the public likely would have never known about these concerning schemes. We will continue to use all legal tools to expose threats to our elections and to challenge them swiftly.”

The newly disclosed records also show that HSI considered using undercover agents to investigate politically targeted non-profits that the administration claims to have suspected of registering non-citizens to vote, with a priority set on New Jersey and Pennsylvania. HSI is seemingly prioritizing investigations into non-profits that conduct voter registration activities, identifying them through non-profit search engines and then seeking out so-called “derogatory information” in other databases. 

The records produced by HSI also note that the agency has obtained 26,235 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)-derived records, and 50.6 million voter roll records from the U.S. Department of Justice for investigating so-called voter fraud. Notably, ICE listed out priority states for each set of these records, including Texas, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. Alarmingly, certain state voter roll data may have been entered into Palantir’s ELITE app, which is used by ICE to identify, prioritize, and locate targets for deportation. HSI may also be investigating voting machines and seeking to prove voter fraud in “counties with 2020 results.” 

HSI is also monitoring primary elections to identify “trends, vulnerabilities, or indicators” that it claims “may impact election integrity,” and has coordinated with U.S. Postal Inspection Service on pursuing so-called voter fraud cases. 

“This trove of ICE documents provides chilling new insights into the breadth and depth of the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to pursue baseless claims of widespread election fraud and assert greater federal control over elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” said Hart Wood, Senior Oversight Counsel at Democracy Forward. “These records also expose the influence of election denier Heather Honey at both DHS and ICE – including her working in partnership with activists and feeding nearly 50 million records from ‘independent sources’ into DHS voter fraud data collection. They also show, for the first time, that HSI may be using undercover agents to investigate non-profits for purely political reasons.” 

Over the past 20 months, Democracy Forward has issued more than 3,630 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in response to the Trump-Vance administration’s harmful and unlawful executive overreach. To obtain records the federal government has withheld, the organization has filed 45 FOIA lawsuits to compel the disclosure as required by law.

Read the response to Democracy Forward’s FOIA request here.

Source: Democracy Forward