Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or voting in the federal election when they were not U.S. citizens — further escalating the election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Authorities said 11 of the 28 people were arrested Monday morning and the remaining 17 “are expected to be in custody for the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are legal permanent residents of the United States, are accused of lying about registering or voting on their naturalization documents, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of having voted, some in several elections. None of them are undocumented immigrants, a favorite target of President Trump and a group he has accused of infiltrating U.S. elections in the past.
Those charged represent a tiny fraction of the 20,000 “probable noncitizens” the Justice Department said were on California’s lists last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration said were on the state’s lists as recently as July.
State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has vastly overestimated claims of voter fraud in other states — including Nevada, where officials recently discovered that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens — and has repeatedly revised downward its estimate of the number of “probable noncitizens” on California’s rolls.
Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter presented the arrests at a news conference Monday as proof that California’s voter rolls are corrupt and must be purged to prevent noncitizens from nullifying the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed the Trump administration’s recent efforts to purge the state’s rolls are deliberately obstructing justice.
“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while noncitizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for California and Los Angeles County.”
State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader allegations — have said that voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any allegations of voting by the Trump administration should be viewed with skepticism.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn called Monday’s arrests “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine confidence in our midterm elections.”
“These arrests are being used to paint a picture of widespread voter fraud when we know that is not the case,” Hahn said. “California has laws in place to protect the integrity of our elections, and Los Angeles County fully complies with them.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 people indicted Monday “represent a tiny fraction” of California’s 23 million registered voters, and that the Trump administration has not shown “evidence of widespread voter fraud, even if the allegations are true.”
Changing demands
For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California, suggesting a broad criminal investigation was underway.
In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California could have more than 190,000 non-citizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar/Clerk’s Office, giving them 48 hours to void the ballots of about 20,000 voters who the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”
When Weber and Logan balked at that request — arguing that the Justice Department had provided no evidence that voters were ineligible, had made similar, inaccurate claims in other states, and made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department filed suit Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and Los Angeles County to comply with McCotter’s requests.
In a filing Monday in the case, federal authorities cited the latest accusations as further reason for the court to step in and, before the election, separate marked ballots until the citizenship of those voters could be verified — once again raising uncertainty about their citizenship status despite claims at their Monday news conference that all were permanent residents.
“This Court should order California to withhold mail-in ballots from potential non-citizens in federal elections – including ballots cast by those charged with (federal election) crimes this morning – until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” the federal lawyers wrote.
The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it is accusing — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others questioned the drop in numbers from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what happened in Nevada, where federal authorities initially reported more than 15,000 potential non-citizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted these discrepancies.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law School, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens is “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters and, based on the Justice Department’s track record, the lion’s share will fall to eligible voters.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens indicted represent “0.0001 percent of California voters” and that the Trump administration indicting 28 people days after reporting 20,000 “raises serious questions about whether the DOJ has evidence to support its claims about the other 19,972 people on its list.”
McCotter said the initial figure of 190,000 was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the higher number representing people in whom the administration had low, medium or high confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller number representing only those in whom it had high confidence were noncitizens.
“So there’s no inconsistency between these numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.
McCotter also said the idea that a federal list of more than 15,000 suspected noncitizens in Nevada resulted in the discovery of no noncitizens was a “false story,” in part because the group as a whole was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 people who were examined – and found to be citizens – were those whose federal government had “great confidence” in their non-citizen status.
It was also not entirely clear how the Justice Department focused on the 28 people charged.
American Atty. Craig Missakian, Northern California’s top federal prosecutor, said prosecutors compared Homeland Security information with voter information they had subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints stated that Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefits Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding allegations of election fraud or indicators of identity-related fraud.”
Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not “based on assumptions or a single piece of information” but required “extensive investigative work, coordination and a commitment to ensuring enforcement actions are supported by the facts.”
Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They come from various countries, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five other people were charged in the Northern District of California, including one from San Francisco and others from the Bay Area; four in the southern district and six in the eastern district.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney. Bill Essayli, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor, rejected the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are exaggerating the threat. “It’s not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “It’s not a made-up thing.”
Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old man from Belize, arrested Monday in a pre-dawn raid at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities say he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019 and voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.
McCotter said that over the past seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people in 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationwide in the 2024 presidential election.
What awaits us
Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.
Essayli said California’s own process of verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring them to certify that they are citizens when registering, is insufficient. He said California election officials “have no idea who is a citizen” but also know “that they have non-citizens receiving ballots as we speak” and admitted several years ago in an audit that non-citizens were registered at the DMV.
“When we submit to California a list of 20,000 non-citizens who we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the state’s response is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,'” he said. “They are not actors in good faith. They are complicit.”
McCotter said there “could be names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “that ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities “are not perfect,” which is why they have asked California authorities to work with them. “We could clear most of these names pretty quickly, probably within a day or two, if California worked with us.”
He said the timing — in the midst of an ongoing election — was due to state officials’ refusal to cooperate earlier. “This is an emergency of their own making.”
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