Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden-Harris administration this week over its refusal to verify the citizenship status of roughly 450,000 voters on state rolls who potentially are ineligible to vote.
Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ur M. Jaddou.
At issue is that the voters in question “registered without a State of Texas-issued driver’s license or identification card.”
“While the majority of the voters on the list are likely citizens who are eligible to vote, Texans have no way of knowing whether or not any of the voters on the list are noncitizens who are ineligible to vote without additional information,” Paxton wrote in the announcement of the lawsuit.
Republicans across the country, in addition to former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, are making election integrity a top priority heading into the Nov. 5 election.
Paxton sent a letter to the Biden-Harris administration on Oct. 7, demanding their cooperation to ensure that noncitizens were not on the state's voter rolls. Two days later, Jaddou directed Paxton and Texas officials to the administration’s “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, calling it “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.”
In his lawsuit, Paxton said SAVE was insufficient. The Texas voter registration system, he wrote, does not contain any “DHS-issued immigration identifier[s].”
“For one thing, the SAVE program is designed to confirm a person’s lawful presence in the United States; it is not an adequate tool, on its own, for a state seeking to verify the citizenship status of an individual on the voter rolls,” Paxton wrote in the lawsuit.
“In addition, the SAVE service requires the use of, among other things, a ‘unique DHS-issued immigration identifier’ — information that is not maintained by, or readily available to, the Secretary of State of Texas or Texas’s voter registrars.”
USCIS told Texas that it "cannot offer an alternative process to any state.”
For those reasons, among others, Paxton said in a post to X that “I will see them in court.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration has refused to comply with federal law, presenting yet another obstacle for Texas to overcome in ensuring free and fair elections in our state,” Paxton said. “The law demands that they provide important information regarding the citizenship of nearly half a million potentially ineligible voters.”