The Department of Justice arrested 11 foreign nationals across California on Monday and charged a total of 28 noncitizens with illegally registering to vote, casting ballots, or making false statements on naturalization applications. The operation, called “Operation Protect the Vote,” was coordinated across all four U.S. attorneys’ offices in the state.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter didn’t pull any punches at the press briefing. “At least eight of these defendants allegedly voted more than once illegally. Including some in the 2026 primary,” he said. So not only were noncitizens voting, some of them apparently liked it so much they did it again. California, everybody.
This crackdown landed just days after the DOJ sued California for refusing to comply with a federal demand to review a list of suspected noncitizen voters and set aside their ballots pending citizenship verification. California noncitizen voter fraud charges McCotter made clear the connection is no coincidence: “Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week.”
Twenty thousand. That’s not a clerical error. That’s a policy. And California’s response to the federal government flagging that list was basically to shrug and keep mailing ballots anyway.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli put it plainly in a press release. “California is mailing ballots to noncitizens, and they are refusing to comply with federal law, which makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote. The voting rights of American citizens must be protected,” he said. He went further, noting that even a single illegal vote does real damage. Elections belong to American citizens, even if one non-citizen votes in an election, that is a violation of the constitutional rights of every voter in California who has a legal right to have their vote be counted equally and not diluted by non-citizens.
California’s November 3 general election is now right around the corner, which makes the state’s foot-dragging on voter verification all the more baffling, unless you understand that California Democrats have basically built their entire electoral operation on the assumption that nobody will ever actually check. Turns out somebody did. Gavin Newsom will probably play dumb when anyone asks about any of this, so stay tuned on that.
The federal government is now in an open legal fight with California over who gets to decide whether ballots from suspected noncitizens get counted. The DOJ lawsuit is still active, the arrests are racking up, and the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizen registrants isn’t getting any shorter. Democrats in Sacramento can keep pretending this is all a big misunderstanding, but it’s tough to explain away 28 federal indictments. The only thing California officials have successfully protected so far is their own embarrassment, and even that’s running out fast.
