During her January 2025 confirmation hearing to be secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem was asked how she would strengthen the nation’s cyberdefenses. Noem told senators that she would make the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller” and “more nimble.” President Trump had created CISA as a stand-alone agency within the Department of Homeland Security during his first term to give cybersecurity more institutional heft, and it had grown quickly with support from lawmakers of both parties. But after CISA declared the 2020 presidential election to be “the most secure in American history” and the agency’s director, Christopher Krebs, refused to back Trump’s claims that the vote had been stolen, Krebs became a target for the president’s fury and a seething grudge.

During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third. The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget, but Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that critical U.S. infrastructure is already too vulnerable.

In June, Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, reversed course. He told lawmakers during a DHS budget hearing that he wants to add 600 positions at CISA. The agency has scheduled new hiring expos, and Acting Director Nicholas Andersen says that he’s “ruthlessly prioritizing” critical cyberdefense roles. But the United States is now nearly six months into a war with Iran, an aggressive and capable cyber foe—and preparations for the midterm elections are under way, with far less intelligence from CISA about foreign and domestic threats.

Hackers with suspected ties to Iran targeted U.S. water and wastewater systems late last month in more than a dozen states. In Braham, Minnesota, the attacks temporarily shut down the water system. The town was one of more than 30 systems that were targeted, state officials said, describing the attacks as the most extensive they’ve seen. The Trump administration has not confirmed Iran’s purported role in the water-system hacks or said how many states or utility systems have been affected—or whether there have been other breaches. Three port facilities in North Carolina reported disruptions to operations from cyberattacks two weeks ago, although authorities haven’t linked the incidents to a specific actor. But CISA, the FBI, and the EPA warned last month that Iran-affiliated hackers are attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. systems. Cybersecurity experts told us that hacking attempts could spread as the midterms approach and hostilities with Tehran enter what Trump has characterized as a more low-key phase aimed at squeezing the Iranian economy. Iran may respond by going after U.S. infrastructure. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite the elevated threat from Iran, the Trump administration continues to focus its attention on questioning the integrity of U.S. elections. The president and Andersen have each met recently with election deniers who have spent years attacking the officials who carry out the democratic process and calling for votes to be counted by hand. The administration has halted federal intelligence briefings for state officials responsible for overseeing the vote, and it has ended funding for an information-sharing network. Federal employees who worked to combat foreign disinformation within CISA were put on leave, and DHS hired Heather Honey, a conservative activist who’d tried to help overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, to oversee election integrity. The administration is investigating the 2020 elections in Georgia and Arizona, and demanding access to data about voters—and Mullin has threatened to throw election officials in prison if they don’t comply.

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

The administration’s stances are deepening distrust and straining relations with state and local election officials, especially those who are Democrats. Although the ability of foreign attackers to change election results remains low, given the decentralization of the system, former CISA officials told us, the broader goal of hackers would be to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and the integrity of U.S. elections. But that’s what the president and his allies are already doing as they continue to make false or unproven claims about rampant voter fraud. State officials worry that if a foreign hack actually happens, the administration will use the incident as a justification to press for more federal control.

CISA was meant to provide nonpartisan, technical expertise and function like the Transportation Security Administration or the Secret Service. It has no regulatory authority, so it relies on the trust of state and local officials who want its support and advice. But the hope that it would float above politics was damaged after the 2020 presidential election. Republican lawmakers erupted at the Biden administration’s attempts to enlist CISA against foreign misinformation campaigns, accusing the administration of “weaponizing” the agency to pressure social-media companies and censor conservative speech.

Today, it’s mostly Democratic officials who are wary of the agency. Half a dozen Democratic secretaries of state, along with some of their staff members, told us that they no longer look to CISA as a reliable partner to help safeguard their election-related systems. They have tried to replace the role of the agency by sharing information with one another and enlisting the help of private contractors, state and local law enforcement, state homeland-security departments and National Guard, emergency-management agencies, and nonprofit organizations (including one filled with ex-CISA officials).

But no other entity can replace the extensive intelligence gathering and threat analysis that the federal government performs by drawing on its web of agencies and cyber units, experts told us. It took years for CISA to earn the trust of state and local election officials, some of whom had been suspicious of the agency during its early days but came to appreciate its help in responding to cyber threats, limiting damage, and even assessing buildings for vulnerabilities in an era shaped by political violence.

Krebs, now an independent consultant, was singled out by the White House in an April 2025 presidential memorandum titled “Addressing Risks From Chris Krebs and Government Censorship” that claimed that he’d “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”  

The attacks on water systems may be a warm-up. Krebs told us that cyberattackers target utilities that are in some way connected to the internet. Many smaller water systems with fewer employees lack expertise but may have a greater need to perform remote operations that require connectivity. During previous attacks on water utilities, hackers sought out systems with poor password security, which allowed them to disrupt operations until the interference was detected. Krebs said that these weaknesses are a result of a wider, lackluster approach to cyber risks, but he added that it’s unfair for Trump officials to tell local governments that it’s solely their responsibility to fend off the attacks.

The U.S. bombing campaign in Iran has hit bridges, desalination plants, and power stations, and Trump has threatened to wipe out the rest of the country’s physical infrastructure. Although Iran can’t retaliate from the air, it can try to hit back online.

“If you’re gonna go start a shooting war with someone that we know has capabilities, you have a responsibility to work with state and local partners and give them a hand,” Krebs said. “You can’t have a geopolitical conflict on a global level that’s going to manifest at the local level and not do anything in between.”

Jen Easterly, who ran CISA during the Biden administration, told us that water systems and other U.S. utilities were created to maximize efficiency and reliability, not security. “They have a lot of inherent weaknesses, but I don’t think these small towns and municipalities should have to defend themselves from the Iranian government,” she said. AI models are making it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit these systems, she said: “The threats are moving faster and the risks are more dangerous than ever.”

Most of the voting equipment used in U.S. elections is not connected to the internet and produces paper ballots as a backup against manipulated tallies. It is the other, online elements of the electoral process that remain most vulnerable, including voter-registration systems and state and local election websites that report results. If hackers can inflict outages or make abrupt changes by hacking those sites, they can damage public confidence.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who serves as secretary of state in Arizona, told us that he remains skeptical of CISA and the administration it reports to. “They cut off all support for us; they’ve threatened to investigate us, they’ve continued to promote falsehoods against election officials across the country,” he said. “And that’s not the posture that an ally would take. That’s what an adversary would do.”

One day after the United States struck Iran’s nuclear capabilities last summer, a suspected pro-Iranian intruder gained access to the Arizona secretary of state’s server and websites. The cyberattacker defaced websites displaying election results dating to 2016 and replaced candidate photos with images of a late Iranian ayatollah. State staff scrambled to limit the damage and alerted state-government officials. But given CISA’s new direction and staff, Fontes did not directly tell the agency as he would have previously. Instead, his office asked state homeland-security officials to connect with CISA—but without identifying the office that was affected. “I don’t trust them,” Fontes told us at the time, adding that he had lost confidence that the agency was collaborating in good faith.

Some state election officials told us that they fear that any information they share with CISA about cyber intrusions, weaknesses, or threats could be used against them as evidence of malfeasance or wrongdoing. They watched that scenario unfold when Trump blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, for cyberattacks on his state’s water utilities, not Iran, the suspected culprit. “The strange thing is, after this water incident and others, I don’t have to worry about state and nonstate malicious actors,” Walz told us. “I have to worry about this administration.”

One election official in a battleground state told us that he had received a threat briefing in April from major technology companies that said that, based on their intelligence, they have a “high degree of confidence that Iran is going to attempt to disrupt the general election this year.” The state official said that he wasn’t surprised by the information but that he was baffled when a CISA official reached out a few weeks ago, after Trump’s prime-time address questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, for the first time in many months to let him know that CISA “would like to come back and help.” He remains skeptical.

Andersen, CISA’s acting director, faced sharp questioning from Democratic secretaries of state when he appeared on a video call with them on Monday, twirling a pen and sipping an energy drink, according to people on the call. They asked him why they should trust the agency, whether CISA would resume offering them intelligence briefings, and whether it would restart penetration testing of their systems (another service that they said had gone dormant) before the November election. Andersen sidestepped some of the questions, gave noncommittal responses to others, and said that government shutdowns had affected various services. He also told the group that some of the services for election officials might resume in 2027, those on the call said.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told us that he got the impression that CISA is “mostly writing off the 2026 election cycle” when it comes to direct services for states. “They kind of seemed resigned to looking forward to the next election cycle and not this one,” Simon said. Several secretaries of state said that although they hope the federal government will restore the services before the November election, it is late in the cycle for CISA to help in any meaningful way.

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Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.

During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”

It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.

Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.

I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”

Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recently blamed Mullin, who took over from Noem in March.

Mullin has pushed back against critics, insisting that ICE enforcement is the most intense it’s ever been, and that officers averaged 4,200 daily arrests nationwide during the first week of August. DHS hasn’t published data backing that claim, though, and the most recent ICE data show that average daily arrests were fewer than half that amount in July. The discrepancy is typical of the way that immigration data tend to surface in social-media posts or in leaks to right-wing publications or influencers, not in the regular, apples-to-apples systematic way that Rosenblum’s former office was designed to deliver.

The fundamental problem is the same one that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro faced when she had to tell the president the truth last week about the Reflecting Pool—that the damage to its lining was likely caused by a botched installation, not vandals. The White House’s benchmark for success—1 million deportations a year—has worked better as a rhetorical device than an achievable goal. ICE’s previous record for deportations was 432,238, set in 2013, according to DHS data. The gap between the president’s expectations and the reality of what ICE can pull off endangers the job of any DHS official who acknowledges numbers that fall short. No one wants to tell the president that his deportation claims have no clothes.

Trump’s return path to the White House was paved by embellished immigration data. Illegal border crossings reached an all-time high during the Biden administration, but Trump, Vice President Vance, and other administration officials have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 20 to 30 million immigrants illegally arrived during Joe Biden’s term. Last year, DHS published on X an idyllic image of a sandy beach with the caption, “America After 100 Million Deportations,” a figure whose basic math amounted to fantasizing about the forced removal of tens of millions of American citizens. Not to be outdone, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, who remains a hero of MAGA hard-liners, said that he wanted to arrest and deport 100 million people, equal to roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population.

The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that the total number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States increased from 10.8 million in 2019 to 15.8 million in 2024. The Pew Research Center, another nonpartisan group, has similar estimates. White House officials including Stephen Miller have depicted Trump’s crackdown as an urgent remedy to the influx that occurred under Biden. But even as the administration ramps up deportations, it has added to the pool of potential deportees by stripping legal status from more than 1.5 million immigrants who were living and working in the United States with Temporary Protected Status or another form of provisional permission. The number of people whose immigration status the administration has rendered illegal over the past 18 months has so far outpaced the number of immigrants ICE has actually deported.

[Read: The problem with shutting down ICE in blue states]

I spoke to opponents of the administration as well as to Republican supporters frustrated by the lack of transparency and the “self-deportation” estimates DHS has used in lieu of hard data. “I don’t care what the data says. Just give it to me,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that backs Trump’s deportation agenda, told me. He said that the only way to get beyond “the partisan chatter” and allow the public to fairly assess the deportation campaign is for the administration to release reliable counts of the number of people ICE has arrested, detained, and deported.

The ICE website periodically publishes enforcement statistics, but the site went dark from April until July, a period during which ICE arrests and deportations lagged behind the levels reached under Noem. The administration blamed Democrats and the congressional shutdown for the data lapse, but officials I spoke with at DHS told me that staff members working through the shutdown could have continued updating the ICE site. When the agency resumed publishing its statistics last month, arrests and deportations were once more on an upswing.

Mike Howell, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who worked in the DHS legal office during Trump’s first term, sued the administration last month to force the release of more ICE data. Howell runs a campaign, the Oversight Project, to press the administration to deliver on Trump’s promises, and he helped launch the Mass Deportation Coalition to rally like-minded groups who see themselves as competing for the president’s sympathies with pro-business interests. “The Trump administration’s deportation numbers should be released with the same transparency, regularity, meaningful metrics, and fanfare as other government numbers, like the jobs report,” Howell wrote in a press release after filing the lawsuit. “Americans should be able to track and cheer progress the same way they watch the stock market.”

[Read: Inside Trump’s reversal on ICE]

Howell told me he wants to see the administration target employers and sweep through farms and factories rather than make individual stops in U.S. cities. “It’s the mass-deportation coalition’s view that people aren’t going to leave unless the deportation numbers are much, much larger,” Howell said. His suspicion, he said, is that the administration exaggerates its enforcement data to merely look tough, as a way to prepare the political terrain for a deal with Democrats after the midterms that would provide legal status to some portion of the unauthorized-immigrant population—the scenario that Howell and his allies abhor as “amnesty.”

During Trump’s first term, when record numbers of Central American families crossed the southern border illegally, DHS officials delayed many releases of monthly data until they could package the numbers in a press release with a favorable spin. The Biden administration initially did this, too, but as it faced intense criticism over record numbers of illegal crossings and images of chaos at the southern border, DHS officials came under pressure from lawmakers from both parties to share more data. The department’s most recent appropriations bill includes new oversight provisions requiring DHS officials to publish more data, but compliance remains spotty.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics was set up outside the typical political review process for a reason, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the top border-policy official at DHS under Biden, who helped start the office and was Rosenblum’s supervisor, told me. “With all of these independent statistical units—whether it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics or some of the other statistical agencies—what makes them special is that they’re supposedly not reporting to political appointees; they’re just producing raw data,” Nuñez-Neto said.

Nuñez-Neto acknowledged that immigration statistics aren’t the same as economic indicators, because immigration data are a measure of a given administration’s own performance on border enforcement—the pace of deportations, for example. “What OHSS was doing was to report on data that is internal to the department’s functioning,” he said, “so there was always a bit of tension.”

[Read: The border wall is back]

During the final year of Biden’s term, as a bipartisan group of senators attempted to negotiate a new border-security deal (which Trump eventually killed), lawmakers funded Rosenblum’s office at levels beyond its requested amount. His team began producing the kinds of user-friendly data tables that allowed the broader public to compare key statistics over time. Their last data set was published January 16, 2025, four days before Trump returned to office.

Rosenblum, who declined to be interviewed, said in his LinkedIn post that it’d been “an honor to serve the public by improving DHS data quality and supporting evidence-based policymaking,” and added a parting shot at the administration. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” he said.

DHS officials have not said when, or if, Rosenblum’s office will resume publishing monthly reports. In the meantime, others are happy to fill the void. Last weekend, the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvert wrote on X that he was told by “a source at DHS” that the department had compiled a report that states there have been 1,461,529 “total alien forced departures” over the past 12 months.

In the comments below the post, which had more than 700,000 views, Kolvert said he wasn’t sure how “total alien forced departures” were calculated. The category is not one used by the DHS statistics office, and although Kolvert claimed that the report had already “dropped,” it has not been published anywhere.