immigrants

WASHINGTON — President Trump has alleged that elections, public benefit programs and federal grants to nonprofits are rife with fraud. Now, he is increasingly focusing on fraud in his effort to detain and deport more immigrants.

Recent, high-profile flash points include 28 lawful permanent residents accused this week of illegally voting in California and the federal investigation into Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

The broader crusade takes many forms, including allegations of fraud in immigration applications, illegal voting by noncitizens and misuse of federal benefits by immigrants who don’t qualify.

“This administration has purposefully mischaracterized immigrants and asylum seekers as fraudsters,” said Royce Murray, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration. That, she said, “serves a narrative that immigrants are not to be trusted and are here to take something rather than contribute, with an end goal of trying to make Americans less welcoming and more comfortable with a mass deportation agenda.”

On Tuesday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance announced a $25-million program under the Justice Department to encourage the public to report suspected fraud in the U.S. government.

The White House said the first check, for $10,000, will go to right-wing influencer Nick Shirley, who posted a video last year alleging that Somali residents in Minnesota were running fake child-care centers to collect federal subsidies. Dozens of people were convicted in connection with a sprawling, $250-million children’s food assistance scheme that predated this administration, though more charges have been announced in recent months.

Also Tuesday, administration officials launched another nationwide anti-fraud crackdown, this time targeting immigrants who they allege have illegally collected SNAP benefits. Homeland Security highlighted the arrests of five people, calling them “the opening salvo in a sustained, large-scale ICE operation.”

“From day one of my administration, we’ve waged an unprecedented war on corruption and fraud, and will not let our country be looted and plundered by thieves and pirates and foreign fraudsters and basically scum,” Trump said during a news conference announcing the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program.

Earlier this year, the White House created a task force to eliminate fraud and the Department of Justice created a fraud enforcement division, in part, to target immigration-related offenses. Prosecutors have put aside thousands of other cases to zero in on immigration enforcement.

The focus on fraud has noticeably accelerated in the weeks leading up to the election.

In California, some of the green card holders arrested this week over voter fraud said they didn’t remember registering to vote. The daughter of one defendant, Omar Muñoz, 72, of Belize, said she wondered whether her father had been confused with his U.S.-born son of the same name, who is a registered voter.

California officials pounced on the small number of people alleged to have cast illegal ballots. Illegal voting by immigrants “is so rare that the Trump admin is parading around town about .0001% of California voters,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office wrote on X.

In the last seven weeks alone, the State Department said, 112 noncitizens across 20 states have been charged with illegal voting and registration offenses. Overall, since Trump returned to the White House, 155 people have been charged with voting fraud-related offenses.

Mullin and Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said earlier this month that Homeland Security agents had secured 10 convictions and detained 100 others for civil immigration violations since August.

During the Biden administration, voter fraud charges were brought in just 13 cases, Blanche added.

Studies and audits of state voter rolls have repeatedly found that voting by noncitizens is rare and hasn’t swayed any elections.

Ballot machines at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder in Norwalk this week. Early voting has started for the 2026 midterm election.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Last week, with mail-in voting already underway, the Justice Department sued California, asking a federal court to bar the state from counting the ballots of 20,000 voters who were flagged by federal officials as “likely noncitizens.” Los Angeles County officials reviewed a sample of 200 of those voter registrations and found that nearly 40% indicated they were born in the U.S.

That number of flagged ballots — 20,000 — is a substantial reduction from the 190,000 noncitizens the administration alleged were on state voter rolls earlier this year, though federal authorities this week said they had found a “separate batch of 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens.”

California leaders pointed to other states, such as Nevada, where similar accusations have proved meritless.

Murray, the former Homeland Security official, said she believes the administration is “trying to sow the seeds of doubt that the midterm outcomes will be trustworthy, so that if the Republican Party loses as badly as they’re predicted to, they can characterize it as due to fraud.”

Murray said the Trump administration has largely misconstrued what it means to commit fraud.

“Fraud is a very specific thing — it’s essentially lying,” she said. “Because you don’t get asylum does not mean you committed fraud, it just means you were ineligible.”

In September, a Homeland Security whistleblower told Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that hundreds of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees had been tasked with quickly reviewing the voter information of thousands of people in search of suspected noncitizen voters, and were given a quota of investigating 40 subjects per day.

On Wednesday, a federal judge restricted Homeland Security agents from carrying out sweeping field operations aimed at rooting out voter fraud in nine states, including California.

It is against federal law for immigrants who are not naturalized citizens to vote or register to do so. Penalties can include fines, jail time and even deportation, though authorities rarely pursued that option.

Eric Balliet, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigative arm of ICE, said he takes no issue with investigating fraud, but the timing of this operation and significant resources dedicated show it is “highly politically charged.”

Balliet worked for various administrations, including Trump’s first, before retiring in 2024. Homeland Security Investigations agents typically focused on transnational criminal investigations such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.

Instead of initiating investigations based on tips or specific information, agents are now taking aggregated data and using algorithms to produce suspect lists, Balliet said. That’s not how law enforcement should operate, he said, calling it a massive privacy overreach against millions of law-abiding citizens.

“It’s the epitome of Big Brother,” he said.

Beyond the allegations of voter fraud, the Trump administration has also increasingly targeted immigrants on suspicion of lying to obtain a visa, green card or citizenship.

Omar’s family fled civil war in Somalia and immigrated to the U.S. in 1995 when she was 12. After agents searched her residence this month looking for evidence that her immigration paperwork contained falsehoods, she called the allegations baseless.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Muillin suggested the outcome of the investigation could be deportation. Years ago, the agency declined to move forward with a probe based on similar allegations against Omar, according to the Washington Post.

The congresswoman is not alone.

Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, 56, who died of unknown causes last week at an ICE facility in Texas, was arrested because the agency alleged he had fraudulently obtained his green card. ICE sought to deport him, saying he had failed to disclose a 2004 arrest for theft, but his daughter told the Texas Tribune that he did bring up his criminal record during the application process for his permanent residency.

Immigration lawyers say their clients are facing more intense scrutiny and that some have battled false accusations of fraud after applying for a green card or citizenship.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler blamed the Biden administration for lax vetting that allowed bad actors to exploit immigration programs.

“These abuses are not harmless,” he wrote in a statement. “Meritless claims clog the system, drain limited resources, and delay relief for legitimate victims of crime. USCIS is taking aggressive action to identify, expose, and eliminate fraud.”

Erin O’Neil, an attorney based in Connecticut, said some of her clients are now in deportation proceedings triggered by allegations of fraud over minor inconsistencies that have no bearing on the case. In one case that resulted in a denial based on fraud, she said, the allegation was simply that her client failed to disclose a two-week work assignment in another state.

“In the past, the worst that would happen is your citizenship application would be denied,” O’Neil said. “Now we have seen through several of my clients that, not only is the citizenship application denied, but they are placed into removal proceedings.”

When federal prosecutors charged 28 California immigrants with illegally registering to vote, they invited friendly media outlets to document the early morning arrest of one suspect.

At a news conference in Los Angeles this week, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli intoned that the defendants’ alleged crimes proved President Trump’s long-held conspiracy theory that voter fraud threatens democracy and that noncitizens are voting by the boatload. Mug shots of the accused — lawful permanent residents, some of whom said they didn’t recall registering to vote — were displayed as if they were part of a Mafia-like conspiracy.

It all felt staged for maximum humiliation.

So what happened to a Costa Mesa woman who registered her dog to vote and attempted to cast ballots for it in two elections?

There was no perp walk for Laura Lee Yourex, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. No melodramatic news conference from Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer.

Nah, Spitzer dismissed Yourex’s case after she paid $1,500 for four electronic billboards along the 22 and 55 freeways. They feature a photo of her late boxer Maya Jean sporting an “I Voted” sticker alongside a warning — “Don’t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime” — and the district attorney’s election fraud hotline number.

Yourex’s attorney has said she was trying to expose flaws in the state’s voter registration system by showing that even a dog could cast a ballot, a gimmick for which Spitzer had little sympathy.

He’s usually the modern-day equivalent of a hanging judge, the type of hard ass who wants his prosecutors to not only throw the book at defendants but also to bury them with a library. In an email, he told me that his office has successfully prosecuted two other voter fraud cases during his eight years in office and is pursuing three current ones. But as serious as voter fraud is, Spitzer has never preened in these cases the way Essayli has.

The Republican stalwart declined to comment on Essayli’s approach, saying he’s “not privy to any of the evidence in those cases.” When I asked why he chose a chuckle-inducing billboard as Yourex’s punishment, he argued that it successfully “address[ed] the harm that is done when engaging in this type of criminal behavior.”

Leave it to the Trump administration to make Spitzer — whose campaign slogan for his 2022 reelection was “#NoLAinOC” — come off as a big ol’ liberal softy. But when it comes to voter fraud, at least he’s meting out penalties that fit the crime, while Essayli is once again making Trump his North Star, not the Constitution.

The defendants charged with voter fraud deserve punishment, if they are indeed guilty. But as my colleagues Brittny Mejia and Kevin Rector reported, citing election experts, cases of noncitizens registering to vote are often a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of immigrants, for example, if they accidentally check a box at the DMV.

Essayli’s record as Trump’s top lawman in Southern California — he can’t even call himself the region’s U.S. attorney, since he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate — is so laughable that I wouldn’t believe him if he claimed that water is wet.

His prosecutors have gone after activists involved in protests against Trump’s masked deportation goons with shoddy charges that were dropped, rejected by grand juries, ridiculed as “amateur hour” by a federal judge or resulted in not guilty verdicts. He’s a lackey who silently stood and watched last year as FBI agents tackled Alex Padilla during a news conference in Los Angeles just because the U.S. senator dared to challenge then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s ludicrous defense of mass immigration raids. He’s a coward who regularly declines to talk to press outlets — including The Times — that don’t think Trump is the greatest president in history.

Unsurprisingly, my request to interview Essayli — or at least receive emailed answers to questions including whether every felony defendant gets arrested with a phalanx of armed officers surrounding their home, whether that’s occurred in other voter fraud cases and whether his office regularly releases mug shots of felony defendants — went unanswered.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said his office is pursuing three voter fraud cases.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Mejia and Rector spoke to some of the accused immigrants and their families swept up by “Operation Protect the Vote,” who were bewildered as to what they had done wrong and why the U.S. Justice Department was swinging such a heavy hammer against them. They shouldn’t be.

What Essayli is doing in the name of rooting out voter fraud isn’t about upholding the law. It’s about validating Trump’s xenophobia. The show trials the defendants will probably face are not about getting rid the worst of the worst, as Trump long claimed. It’s about casting suspicion on all immigrants, legal and not.

What’s especially ironic — no, disgusting — about Essayli’s claims that immigrants who wrongly register to vote are disenfranchising American citizens is that the portrait of this country’s biggest election scofflaw hangs in every federal courthouse. It was Trump who wanted Congress to stop the electoral college from formalizing his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, claiming that Democrats stole the White House from him, and provoked a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol.

But facts have never stopped Essayli from making a pendejo out of himself. His pathetic, dangerous charade reminds me of an infamous voter fraud case from 30 years ago. I wrote about it this summer when Trump first announced he was going to sic the Justice Department on noncitizens who were supposedly voting en masse.

Back then, Loretta Sanchez forever changed O.C. politics when she beat Republican Rep. Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Like Trump, Dornan claimed he lost because of immigrants who illegally voted. Like today’s GOP, sympathetic prosecutors and lawmakers at the local and federal levels spent way too much time and taxpayer money looking into the baseless allegations.

Just as Operation Protect the Vote has already shown this year, with only 28 charged out of about 23 million registered voters in California, Sanchez’s 1996 victory was not achieved through a vast immigrant voting conspiracy.

At least in the Dornan fiasco, Republicans finally dropped their investigation and moved on. The few immigrants who did vote improperly had their ballots tossed but otherwise faced no legal problems.

I doubt Trump and Essayli will give up so easily. That would require humility, mercy and the ability to admit they’re wrong.

But hey, if a dog can cast a vote in California, I guess anything’s possible.