Power Grab/Fire anyone who can stop him
ICE’s investigative arm seeks a contractor to buy voter registration and voting-history files from as many as all 50 states
Homeland Security Investigations posted a request for information with a draft statement of work. It is market research, and no contract has been awarded.
What happened
On August 25, 2026, Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, posted a request for information on SAM.gov with a draft statement of work. A private contractor would acquire one public voter registration file per year from each jurisdiction the agency names, with capacity to cover all 50 states, D.C. and the territories.
The draft also covers voter history files for specified federal elections, for what ICE called fraud detection and data segmentation. It bars delivery of party-affiliation fields unless the contracting officer directs otherwise in writing. The document does not define data segmentation.
Where state law limits commercial access, DHS would send law-enforcement authorization letters designating the vendor as its agent. The request runs parallel to the Justice Department’s demands for unredacted voter rolls from nearly every state, which courts have largely rejected.
Who benefited
ICE and DHS would obtain a continuously refreshed national file of who is registered and who votes, assembled by a vendor. It would sit outside the litigation that has stalled the Justice Department’s direct demands. The eventual contractor would also benefit, and so would election-fraud enforcement, which could match the data against DHS’s SAVE database.
Who wanted something
Homeland Security Investigations drafted and posted the solicitation. The push to acquire voter data flows from Trump’s 2025 and 2026 election executive orders. The Justice Department’s voting-section chief testified in March 2026 that collected voter data would be run against SAVE under a memorandum of understanding with DHS.
Who lost out
Every registered voter would have a name, address, age, precinct and turnout history in an immigration-enforcement agency’s files. Naturalized citizens are most exposed to false non-matches against DHS records. States whose restrictions on who may buy their files would be bypassed through law-enforcement letters, such as Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia and New Hampshire, lose that control.
Why it matters
After courts blocked the Justice Department from demanding voter rolls, ICE moved to buy them through a vendor. There is then no order for a state to refuse and no defendant to sue. An immigration-enforcement agency would be building a national voter file for a purpose it does not define, with a written path to adding party affiliation.
Sources Project Salt BoxICE / SAM.gov (via Project Salt Box) (primary)