Estelle, a longtime U.S. permanent resident, is no stranger to the reentry process after visiting family in her native France. Yet on her latest trip through customs in mid-March, officers held the 30-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, made her sleep on a concrete slab in a detention cell, and threatened her with deportation. The reason? She admitted to customs officers during questioning that she had once voted in a local election, even though she was not a U.S. citizen. A handful of U.S. cities permit noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not among them. Both Kansas and federal law mandate U.S. citizenship for voter registration. Immigration and election specialists describe her previously unreported case as a fresh escalation in the Trump administration’s drive to identify and criminally pursue noncitizen voting, even though extensive evidence shows the practice is extremely rare. (Estelle requested that her surname be withheld for safety reasons.) In the past, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has had no involvement in investigations into election fraud. The transcript of Estelle’s interview — obtained by ProPublica through her lawyer — shows that the agency had singled her out for heightened scrutiny and that officers were aware of her voting record. Estelle informed the officer during her interview that she believed she was allowed to vote in local elections, after a state motor vehicles department worker told her so while she was renewing her driver’s license. Kerry Doyle, a deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration, said she had never heard of anyone being held at a port of entry on suspicion of illegal voting. “It took them a whole lot of energy and effort to sift through all these things to find this needle in the haystack,” said Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney.
