[ad_1]
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden-Harris administration for not offering info that the Republican says he must confirm the citizenship of 450,000 “potentially ineligible voters.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, in addition to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and its director, Ur Jaddou, are named as defendants.
The federal lawsuit, filed within the Western District of Texas, claims that the Biden-Harris administration has refused to adjust to federal regulation and reply “valid requests” for info 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 these over 450,000 folks didn’t use a Texas-issued driver’s license or ID card to register to vote within the state, so “those voters never had their citizenship verified.”
Nelson wrote to Jaddou on Sept. 18 saying the Texas Secretary of State’s workplace compiled a listing of people on Texas’ voter rolls whose citizenship couldn’t be verified and requested for help in doing so.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing over voter citizenship verification. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)
Paxton penned an identical 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.”
“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,” Jaddou defined. “The state elections authority must provide any individual who is not verified as a U.S. citizen through SAVE the opportunity to show documentation of their U.S. citizenship.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is known as as a defendant. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Paxton’s lawsuit states that “pointing to the SAVE system” doesn’t fulfill the Texas secretary of state’s request and Jaddou’s response doesn’t fulfill USCIS’s “unambiguous obligations under federal law.”
It additionally says that Jaddou has not responded to Paxton’s letter.
According to Paxton, the SAVE program, designed to verify an individual’s lawful presence within the United States, “is not an adequate tool, on its own, for a state seeking to verify the citizenship status of an individual on the voter rolls.” That’s as a result of it requires using a “unique DHS-issued immigration identifier,” which the lawsuit says is “information that is not maintained by, or readily available to, the Secretary of State of Texas or Texas’s voter registrars.”
Texas’s statewide voter registration system “does not contain any “DHS-issued immigration identifier[s],” the lawsuit says, so even if the Texas Secretary of State “might acquire this knowledge from the Texas Department of Public Safety, that effort can be restricted to people who offered such info to acquire a driver license or private identification card – and thus wouldn’t embody people for whom there is no such thing as a Texas-issued driver license or ID card quantity in Texas’s voter registration system.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services pointed to the SAVE program. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The filing also noted that USCIS charges users a fee for each verification submitted to the SAVE system – fees that the state is willing to pay but “will greater than double over the subsequent three years.”
“Although federal and state regulation prohibit non-citizens from voting, federal regulation paradoxically creates alternatives for non-citizens to illegally register to vote whereas prohibiting States from requiring voters to have proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections – a standard sense measure to establish unlawful registration,” the suit says. “Under any circumstances, this federal prohibition in opposition to citizenship verification makes little sense, however it’s particularly troubling given the present scale of the unlawful immigration disaster.”
The submitting additionally cited how the Senate has not handed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (“SAVE Act”), “which might enable states to make sure that votes are being solid legally by eligible voters.”
Asked about Paxton’s lawsuit, a DHS spokesperson again pointed to the SAVE program.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
“DHS doesn’t touch upon pending litigation,” the DHS spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “More broadly, USCIS has engaged with Texas and can proceed to correspond with them instantly by means of official channels. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) administers an on-line info service referred to as SAVE that permits registered and licensed businesses, together with election authorities in states, to confirm sure people’ citizenship or immigration standing.”
Scores of election-related lawsuits happen in every cycle, and Florida filed a similar lawsuit citing how the SAVE program’s DHS identifier requirement is a roadblock in verifying citizenship of those on the voter roll.
While Texas could see Republican Sen. Ted Cruz locked in a close race against Democratic challenger, Rep. Colin Allred, the Lone Star State is unlikely to go blue in the presidential contest.
[ad_2]
Source hyperlink