The Department of Justice announced Monday that 28 foreign nationals living in the United States have been charged with voter fraud crimes as part of the Trump administration’s Operation Protect the Vote. Eleven of them are already in custody in California, and the arrests are part of a broader sweep that has now netted 113 people across 20 states in the last seven weeks.
To put that in perspective, the entire Biden administration managed to charge exactly 13 people with voter fraud over four years. Thirteen. California alone now has more than double that in a single Monday morning, but sure, nothing to see here.
Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter held a press conference in Los Angeles to lay out the stakes. Today’s charges demonstrate why that lawsuit’s so important,” he said, referencing a separate DOJ lawsuit filed just days earlier over California’s mail-in voting system, which the DOJ claims carries more than 20,000 “likely aliens” on its voter rolls. “It’s about preventing the voter fraud that cancels out the votes of U.S. citizens. Enforcing federal law increases the integrity of elections, and increases confidence in elections.” The DOJ also filed an emergency motion Monday requesting a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to set aside the flagged ballots until citizenship can be confirmed. For more details on the California voter fraud charges, the full breakdown from federal prosecutors makes for some uncomfortable reading if you’re a Sacramento bureaucrat.
All 28 defendants are permanent residents or green card holders, meaning they’re here legally but flat-out not allowed to vote. That apparently didn’t stop many of them, with the DOJ saying a number are accused of voting multiple times, including in the October 2026 primary. Some have been registered to vote for over 20 years. Ten are Mexican nationals, with others coming from Guatemala, the Philippines, and Canada. Charges range from misdemeanors to felonies, including fraudulent voter registration and false statements on naturalization applications, both of which carry up to five years in prison.
The kicker is how California responded to the federal government’s attempts to clean this mess up. McCotter said the Department of Homeland Security and the DOJ spent the entire summer asking California to work with them to verify citizenship on voter rolls and never got a single response. “We asked California to work collaboratively in that process. We never heard anything back,” he told reporters. The Los Angeles County elections office also reportedly refused to cooperate. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli put it plainly: “California is mailing ballots to noncitizens, and they are refusing to comply with federal law.”
California’s Attorney General’s Office did eventually issue a statement, with spokesperson Walter Garcia pointing out that 28 people represent about 0.0001% of the state’s 23 million registered voters and calling the cases “isolated.” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber had previously questioned the DOJ’s methodology, to which McCotter replied, “We have now revealed the sourcing here and the methodology. We think it’s pretty solid.” The DOJ cross-referenced the state’s voter rolls with DHS immigration data, excluding naturalized citizens, deceased voters, and those with parent-based citizenship. That’s not a methodology problem. That’s called doing the job California refused to do.
The DOJ has warned California since July that as many as 190,000 noncitizen voters could be on its rolls, with the 20,000 figure representing those most likely to be noncitizen registrants. McCotter made the state’s next move clear: “California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.” Whether Sacramento listens or keeps stonewalling is anyone’s guess, but the federal courts are now involved, and Operation Protect the Vote is just getting warmed up.
