Iowa election officials sued the Biden administration after the federal government declined to hand over a list of noncitizens registered to vote in the state before the 2024 elections. 

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officials refused to hand over a list of noncitizens illegally registered to vote in Iowa “despite having confirmed that hundreds of noncitizens were on Iowa’s voter rolls after a manual individualized process,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate and Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a lawsuit Tuesday. The complaint is filed against the Department of Homeland Security and its subagency, USCIS.

Without the USCIS records, state officials instead checked voter rolls against a less reliable list of 2,176 people who had identified themselves as noncitizens with the Iowa Department of Transportation. 

Iowa’s statewide voter registration system does not contain any of the “DHS-issued immigration identifier[s]” the USCIS has access to, the defendants said, often making it difficult to identify noncitizen voters. 

Pate and Bird argued that without sufficient data to screen possible illegal voters independently, Iowa election officials were forced to mandate that the 2,176 people in question, many of whom had become naturalized citizens, show proof of citizenship or cast a provisional ballot during the elections in order to have their ballots counted.

“USCIS’s failure meant that the State had to rely on the best — imperfect — data it had available to ensure that no Iowan’s vote was canceled by an illegal, noncitizen vote,” the two Iowa officials said in a joint release Wednesday. 

The Washington Examiner reached out to USCIS for comment but had not received a reply at the time of publishing.

A victory for Iowa in court would force federal officials to share requested data on noncitizen voters with the state and require USCIS to release the lists in question. 

“The combination of access to the SAVE list, citizenship verification already completed by USCIS, and the ability to verify using social security numbers will not only make processes more efficient but will also provide another important tool in our toolbox to safeguard our elections process,” Pate said in a statement Wednesday. 

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program is another tool used by the USCIS to scrutinize immigration status. 

The latest lawsuit comes after the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa sued Pate on Oct. 30 over his requirement that the 2,176 self-identified noncitizens from the state’s Department of Transportation list show proof of citizenship or cast provisional ballots. 

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Representing four people on the list who had become naturalized citizens, the ACLU argued that the plan was unconstitutional. 

A federal judge denied the group’s request to stop the ballot challenges two days before the election.