With the midterm elections approaching — November's contests will decide control of both chambers of Congress — and President Donald Trump continuing to press his voter-fraud claims, a whistleblower from his first administration says the president's "tin-foil hat" plan to "interfere in the democratic process" is now underway.

Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during Trump's first term and later exposed a number of the administration's secrets, sounded the alarm on Wednesday, warning that an effort Trump began nearly a decade ago has entered its most dangerous phase. Taylor also revealed himself in October 2020 as the anonymous author of the 2018 New York Times op-ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."

Over the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are "no plans" to do so without ruling it out. But "evidently," Taylor wrote, "all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent."

Taylor was citing new reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats — have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. The agency's statutory duties involve immigration benefits — green cards, asylum claims, naturalization petitions — not election administration. "This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections," Taylor wrote.

Although the administration has been deliberately obscure about the operation, Taylor argued, it "expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for 'illegal' registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls."

The reassignments, Taylor asserted, form part of a wider effort to convert "the Justice Department's Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them." The administration, he wrote, has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build "approved" lists of voters, and, "as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail." The section's traditional mandate runs the other way: it enforces federal voting protections such as the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which governs how states maintain their registration lists. And under the country's decentralized system, election rolls have always been kept by states and localities rather than Washington.

Taylor traced the effort back to Trump's first term. "I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about," he wrote. "There wasn't any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That's what they're doing now." The first term saw a parallel chapter: Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, created in 2017 to substantiate his claim that millions had voted illegally in 2016. Most states refused or sharply limited its sweeping request for their voter files, and Trump disbanded the panel in January 2018 without documenting widespread fraud.

Thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors, Taylor noted, have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president "seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot."

The administration continues to insist that all of its efforts are focused on what Taylor called "the phantom menace of 'noncitizen voters,'" adding that "the pretext is collapsing under its own weight." Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin's claim of 16,000 in that state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185 — and then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate. Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime under a 1996 law, and the confirmed cases surfaced by past state audits and academic studies have consistently represented a tiny fraction of ballots cast.

"Nothing in American history looks like this. At all," Taylor wrote. "Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism."