Armed federal agents are knocking on doors to question residents about citizenship and voting

Two weeks before Election Day, federal agents carrying guns and wearing uniforms have been showing up at homes in several states to ask people about their immigration status and whether they have registered or voted. The visits are part of a federal drive to find noncitizens who may be on voter rolls.

The door knocking picked up in September and kept going through this past weekend. It is being carried out by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that usually works cases like drug smuggling, money laundering and child exploitation. Internal documents show hundreds of agents were pulled off other work for the effort.

How targets are chosen

An agent familiar with the program said the department builds lists by pulling names from its own records, from voter rolls and from other data sets and then checking them against citizenship records kept by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. One video posted online shows agents holding a sheet labeled as a target list.

A whistleblower from the citizenship agency said in September that staff were told to review the voting records of tens of thousands of people, including citizens, at a pace of about 40 people a day. The department denies any quota and says the reviews are careful and professional.

Field reviews are under way in at least six states: California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. On Monday the Justice Department said agents in California had arrested more than 20 green card holders accused of illegally registering or voting.

What the numbers show

Homeland Security has claimed that as many as 250,000 noncitizens could be registered to vote. Election experts dispute that figure. About 156 people have been charged with voting fraud offenses since the current administration took office, out of roughly 227 million registered voters nationwide. In Nevada officials first said they had flagged close to 16,000 noncitizens on the rolls but could not show proof of a single illegal registration.

Fears of a chilling effect

A retired agent who spent 23 years with the investigations unit said he never saw agents sent to private homes to check whether someone was eligible to vote. A lawyer with a voting rights group that is suing over the program said the visits look designed to frighten lawful voters away from the polls.

An Emory University professor who studies voting rights said the message reaching immigrant neighborhoods is simple: stay home. She warned that naturalized citizens who are fully eligible may decide voting is not worth the risk.

A department spokesperson said agents are focused on people who are in the country illegally and voted and that anyone here legally who follows the law has nothing to fear.