About a month after alleging Nevada had as many as 16,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials admitted they had confirmed that only 185 were actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian.

In a primetime TV address on 16 July, Donald Trump claimed that a DHS review had found about 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states.

In follow-up letters to those states – Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey – DHS softened that claim, saying it represented a ceiling of potential non-citizens registered.

Experts expressed skepticism over the claim, predicting that the ultimate number of confirmed non-citizens would drop dramatically and noting that DHS had not revealed its methodology, nor provided a list of voters to the states.

In its letter to Nevada, DHS suggested there may be as many as 15,903 non-citizens registered in the state. DHS officials met with Nevada election officials last week for the first time to discuss the claim, and said they were still reviewing the data and that 15,903 represented the ceiling of how many non-citizens could be registered.

“We’ve manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens. We still have 14,000+ that still need additional review,” Kimberley Vogt, a DHS official, wrote to Nevada election officials on Thursday.

The department also sent the state an additional 6,218 people whose information it had not yet manually reviewed, but for whom it had made a “higher confidence match” that they could be non-citizens. “We’d just wanted to share them in case you might want to start reviewing those since it was mentioned on the call that you have a quickly approaching deadline to mail out ballots.”

“Weeks after the President held a national, primetime speech making sweeping claims regarding noncitizens and the security of our elections, DHS representatives informed our office that the numbers that were provided to the public are preliminary and that there is not high enough confidence to be able to share the full dataset with Nevada officials,” Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat who serves as Nevada’s secretary of state, said in a statement. “The Secretary of State’s Office will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters and ripping away their Constitutional right to vote without the highest confidence of their ineligibility.”

The Guardian obtained a recording of the meeting, as well as emails through a public records request. A DHS spokesperson said in a statement it was “false” and the department had only confirmed 185 people on the list were non-citizens.

“The 185 are the individuals that had gone through manual review. The list shared with Nevada also included 6218 other individuals with the highest number of matching attributes. This was at the request of NV. They wanted to start with a subset less than the 15,903,” the spokesperson said.

In a 14 August meeting with DHS officials, Nevada elections director Mark Wlaschin and other staffers in the secretary of state’s office pressed the federal government to explain how it had gone about flagging non-citizens. DHS officials said they compared Nevada’s public voter rolls from July 2025 to internal immigration data from US Customs and Immigration Services. On the call was Heather Honey, a prominent election denier known for misleading research into voter records, who now works at DHS.

At one point, C Murphy Hebert, Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state, asked officials to clarify whether the 15,000 number was a ceiling on the number of potential non-citizens. “What you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted, basically. It’s the number that you are starting with,” Hebert said.

“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence ‘it hasn’t been vetted’ because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000,” Vogt replied. She acknowledged the 15,000 number was “preliminary” and there hadn’t been a “full manual review” of each one.

“It’s a lot of work to go one by one. I’m sure you can imagine,” said Vogt. “We don’t just have, you know, like a thousand people to drop from the sky and parachute in and help us out with that. So we are making our way through it.”

This week, the president also touted a document from the US Census Bureau with shoddy claims about non-citizen voting in the 2020 election.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a non-profit organization focused on election administration, said the episode underscores how the administration was determined to spread false information about voting.

“The administration continues to make baseless claims of widespread noncitizen voting, and every time, they refuse to show their work or justify their methodology,” he said. “In Nevada, and every other time, when states demand evidence and transparency, the administration’s claims wither away to small numbers.”

In a 15 July press conference, DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with fines and prison time if they didn’t comply with efforts to remove voters.

During the last week, Wlaschin asked the DHS officials to confirm that none of them had been referred for criminal investigation.

“You are addressing this, and we think that you’re doing so in good faith. And of course the Department of Homeland Security would just not have the statutory authority to charge an election official; we don’t do enforcement of those particular laws,” Honey said. “We have made no criminal referrals.”

While the meeting between state and federal officials seemed cordial, there were a few moments of underlying tension between the Trump administration and many state election officials.

At one point, Wlaschin interrupted a DHS official to correct his pronunciation of Nevada. “I’d be remiss and every fellow Nevadan would lose their mind if I didn’t correct you. It’s said Nevada, not Nevahda. I grew up on the East Coast; I’m sure I got it wrong at first, but Nevada, if you don’t mind, please.”

Later in the meeting, Nicolas Bartell, a DHS official, complimented Nevada on the quality of its voter data compared to other states. He would not name the other states, saying: “We don’t name and shame.”

“Except in the press releases”, cut in Hebert.

“I leave that to the Department,” Bartell replied.