DHS, Four GOP States Settle Immigration Voting Data Suits (1)

Officials from four Republican-led states reached an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security making it easier for states to access immigration data used to investigate potential migrant voting.

The settlement between DHS and officials from Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio—filed Friday in federal court—resolves a quartet of federal lawsuits pursued since 2024 as part of broader efforts by conservatives to combat illegal voting by immigrants, which studies have shown is exceedingly rare.

The states will negotiate with the federal government within three months to enter new information sharing agreements to help improve and modernize DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. The states may each provide the federal government with 1,000 random driver’s license records for verification to help improve the database.

DHS has two months to ensure the database has certain capabilities, according to the agreement. They include free service for state and local agencies, the ability to use Social Security Administration data for certain searches, the capacity for states to bulk upload verification requests, and the ability to obtain immigration-status information either within two days or within a reasonable period.

Certain other outstanding verification requests made with the federal government must also be fulfilled within a month.

The settlement involves several states that have left the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps roughly two dozen states update their voter rolls. Instead of using that secure process, these states appear to be giving the “crown jewels” of personal identifiable information to the Trump administration which has already uploaded such things to vulnerable servers, said David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“If you can find people that for whatever reason are ineliglbe, states should remove them. The question is at what cost?” he said.

Consolidated Suit

The states filed their lawsuits separately but joined together on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida for a new combined complaint before filing the settlement agreement. A similar lawsuit filed in Texas remains pending.

The agreement could supercharge enforcement by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R), who’s made prosecuting migrants a focus in his first year in office. Uthmeier has supported local efforts to prosecute migrants using Florida’s criminal code and has touted work by his branch’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, which received permission to prosecute migrant voting crimes by a Florida appeals court.

Similar efforts are underway in Ohio, where Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) has made criminal referrals to the state attorney general’s office and the Justice Department for what he said were suspected election-related crimes.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) said in a news release that the agreement “will help Iowa safeguard the integrity of our elections for years to come by preventing an illegal vote to cancel out the vote of Iowa citizens.”

A DHS spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Becker said that the DHS data has gotten mixed reviews for accuracy, and states that have tried to make a big splash investigating immigrant voting have come up nearly empty handed. Texas has claimed that thousands of noncitizens were registered but has prosecuted only a few dozen, while an Ohio official claimed there were hundreds of examples but only a handful of cases were pursued.

States have to weigh these cases against potentially supplying residents’ dates of birth, drivers’ license numbers, and Social Security numbers to an administration that uploaded Social Security numbers to an unsecured cloud server and inadvertently released the governor-elect of New Jersey’s full number this year.

“If I were a resident of one of those states, I’d be very concerned about my information security,” he said. “What happens if the federal government accidentally releases this information—if someone applies for a fraudulent mortgage using data they never should have had, where does a person go to receive compensation?”

The Florida, Indiana, and Iowa parties are represented by their respective state attorney general’s offices. LaRose and Ohio are represented by Boyden Gray PLLC. The Homeland Security defendants are represented by the Justice Department.

The case is Florida v. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., N.D. Fla., No. 3:24-cv-00509, motion to dismiss filed 11/28/25.