Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon defended the Trump administration’s investigation into noncitizen voting during an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” while disputing host Lesley Stahl’s suggestion that the investigation could deepen public distrust in elections.
Stahl noted that noncitizens who vote are rare and asked what purpose the investigation served. Dhillon replied that the goal was not to sow distrust, arguing instead that distrust already exists. She said federal authorities were prosecuting election-related offenses in greater volume and pointed to 13 noncitizen-voting prosecutions during the Biden administration.
Stahl characterized that number as small. Dhillon responded that the current administration had been in office for less than two years, investigations had been underway for more than a year, and the process takes time. She said the government was examining thousands of cases, without providing further detail in the supplied account.
The interview followed Dhillon’s July pledge that the Justice Department would pursue every provable case of illegal voting. She described the approach as a “broken windows” strategy: investigating credible leads and bringing cases supported by evidence, rather than limiting federal attention to conduct deemed widespread or capable of changing an election outcome.
The source links that policy shift to scrutiny of voter rolls after New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said thousands of noncitizens had been placed on the state’s voter rolls through the motor-voter system. The material does not provide details about how many people voted, or the outcome of any specific investigation.
Stahl also asked whether the administration planned to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling places. Dhillon said there were no such plans.
On the possibility that a noncitizen’s ballot could prompt a challenge, Dhillon said the individual vote could be challenged, but not the entire election. Asked whether she could rule out a challenge to a state’s results, she said she could not predict what might happen. She added that, absent an unexpected and serious contingency, the usual process of counting and certifying state results should proceed without interruption.
The program included a voice-over in which Stahl characterized Dhillon as dismissing concerns that President Donald Trump might challenge the midterm results as “paranoia.” The supplied account does not include a direct Dhillon quotation using that word.
After the broadcast, Dhillon posted on X that she had corrected what she called “fake news” during the interview, while alleging that the program edited out most of her answers. CBS had not immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment, according to the supplied report. The account does not include CBS’s response or independently establish how much of the interview was omitted.
