Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden-Harris administration for not providing information that the Republican says he needs to verify the citizenship of 450,000 “potentially ineligible voters.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, as well as the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and its director, Ur Jaddou, are named as defendants.
DHS says states wishing to verify citizenship can use the USCIS SAVE program and that it will not provide an “alternative process to any state.”
The federal lawsuit, filed in the Western District of Texas, claims that the Biden-Harris administration has refused to comply with federal law and answer “valid requests” for information from Paxton and Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson “for the citizenship status of the over 450,000 people on Texas’s voter rolls for whom the State cannot verify their citizenship status using existing sources.”
Paxton says those over 450,000 people did not use a Texas-issued driver’s license or ID card to register to vote in the state, so “those voters never had their citizenship verified.”
Nelson wrote to Jaddou on Sept. 18 saying the Texas Secretary of State’s office compiled a list of individuals on Texas’ voter rolls whose citizenship could not be verified and asked for assistance in doing so.
Paxton penned a similar letter to the USCIS director on Oct. 7, 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.”
In a letter to Nelson on Oct. 10, Jaddou responded, saying 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,” and maintained that USCIS “currently cannot offer an alternative process to any state.”
“Since 2009, SAVE has been used by elections authorities in states for voter registration and/or voter list maintenance. Currently, ten states are registered to use SAVE for these purposes,” Jaddou wrote. “The process has been the same since the program’s inception.”
