Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton waves after speaking during the
Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hilton Anatole
on July 11, 2021 in Dallas, Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he recently filed a
lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for not providing
the state with necessary information regarding the citizenship status of
450,000 individuals in question.
“The law demands that they provide important information regarding
the citizenship of nearly half a million potentially ineligible voters,”
Paxton wrote. “Since the Biden-Harris Administration has chosen to
ignore the law, I will see them in court.”
Paxton’s office gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until October 19th
to assist in verifying the citizenship status of the 450,000
questionable voters, which Paxton stated was due to the individuals
registering without any form of Texas-issued identification.
DHS responded to the request, stating that all states requesting
assistance with verifying voter citizenship need to utilize the United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) SAVE program.
Paxton wrote a letter to the USCIS director on October 7th,
stating: “Although I have no doubt the vast majority of the voters on
the list are citizens who are eligible to vote, I am equally certain
that Texans have no way of knowing whether or not any of the voters on
the list are noncitizens who are ineligible to vote.”
The USCIS director, Ur Jaddou, a defendant in the filing, responded
to the request, explaining that the “Systematic Alien Verification for
Entitlements (SAVE) program is the most secure and efficient way to
reliably verify an individual’s citizenship or immigration status,
including for verification regarding voter registration and/or voter
list maintenance.”
“By inputting an individual’s name, unique DHS-issued immigration
identifier, and birthdate, registered agencies can determine whether
that person obtained U.S. citizenship through the naturalization process
or, for certain other individuals born abroad, whether USCIS has
information confirming their U.S. citizenship. Each registered agency
determines the best process to obtain the required identifiers,” Jaddau
continued. “The state elections authority must provide any individual
who is not verified as a U.S. citizen through SAVE the opportunity to
show documentation for their U.S. citizenship.”
Although Jaddou pointed the Texas AG to the SAVE program, the lawsuit
argues that the system in place “is not an adequate tool, on its own,
for a state seeking to verify the citizenship status of an individual on
the voter rolls,” due to the prerequisite of a “unique DHS-issued
immigration identifier,” which the suit argues is “information that is
not maintained by, or readily available to, the Secretary of State of
Texas or Texas’s voter registrars.”
Additionally, the lawsuit cites that Texas’ voter registration system
does not hold any records of “DHS-issued immigration identifier[s],”
meaning that even if the state “could obtain this data from the Texas
Department of Public Safety, that effort would be limited to individuals
who provided such information to obtain a driver license or personal
identification card – and thus would not encompass individuals for whom
there is no Texas-issued driver license or ID card number in Texas’s
voter registration system.”
“Although federal and state law prohibit non-citizens from voting,
federal law paradoxically creates opportunities for non-citizens to
illegally register to vote while prohibiting States from requiring
voters to have proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections – a
common sense measure to identify illegal registration,” the suit
continued. “Under any circumstances, this federal prohibition against
citizenship verification makes little sense, but it is especially
troubling given the current scale of the illegal immigration crisis.”
Meanwhile, a DHS spokesperson responded, highlighting the SAVE
program as the only way to verify the citizenship of all individuals on
voter rolls.
“DHS does not comment on pending litigation,” the spokesperson
stated. “More broadly, USCIS has engaged with Texas and will continue to
correspond with them directly through official channels. U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) administers an online
information service called SAVE that allows registered and authorized
agencies, including election authorities in states, to verify certain
individuals’ citizenship or immigration status.”
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