Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — again escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday morning and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of casting votes, some in multiple elections. None 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 “likely noncitizens” that the Justice Department alleged are on California rolls just last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration alleged were on state rolls as recently as July.
State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has badly overstated voter fraud claims in other states. In Nevada, for example, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens. The administration has repeatedly revised downward its estimate for how many “likely noncitizens” are on California’s rolls.
Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.
“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”
State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader claims — said voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any voting allegations from the Trump administration must be viewed with skepticism.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn referred to Monday’s arrests as “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust 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 L.A. County is fully abiding by them.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 individuals charged 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.”
Shifting claims
For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California — suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.
In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”
When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.
In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters’ citizenship can be verified — again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.
“This Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election — including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning — until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” federal attorneys wrote.
The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it’s charged — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ’s track record, the lion’s share will be eligible voters.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent “.0001% of California voters,” and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 “raises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.”
McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.
“So there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.
McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a “false storyline,” in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted — and found to be citizens — were those the federal government had held “high confidence” in being noncitizens.
How the Justice Department further zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals also was not entirely clear.
U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.”
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 “thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is 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 hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. “This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made-up stuff.”
Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old Omar Munoz from Belize, who was arrested in a pre-dawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.
In federal court downtown late Monday, Munoz’s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.
She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father’s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. “Did the names get misconstrued,” she wondered.
McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.
What’s ahead
Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.
Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak” and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.
“When we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,’” he said. “That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.”
McCotter said there “may be some names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities are “not perfect,” which is why they’ve asked California officials to work with them. “We could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.”
He said the timeline — amid an ongoing election — was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. “It’s an emergency of their own creation.”
