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A top federal prosecutor in California said federal investigators determined that the 20,000 people they flagged on the state’s voter rolls as “probably noncitizens” were not U.S. citizens.
Bill Essayli, first assistant attorney for the Central District of California, told Fox News Digital that federal investigators have evidence that those 20,000 people received mail-in ballots this month. His office sued California last week seeking a court order preventing returned ballots from being counted.
“We are not asking California to take drastic action other than confiscating the ballots of suspected non-citizens,” Essayli said in an interview Wednesday. “We think it’s a minimum of 20,000 people. That’s the floor.”
The potential ceiling, he said, is much higher. Essayli referenced a July letter sent to California by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that flagged nearly 200,000 voters as possible non-citizens.
Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, appears during a news conference at the Spring Street Courthouse on August 13, 2026. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
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Since then, federal investigators have sifted through those records to identify people they believe they can verify as noncitizens.
He said 20,000 was just the current count and he expected thousands more names to be added in the coming days.
Earlier this week, Essayli got into a social media spat with Gov. Gavin Newsom over state safeguards against non-citizen voting.
Essayli argued that California allows people without citizenship to register to vote through its supposedly lax verification processes, while Newsom said the state follows all relevant federal laws governing election integrity.
In court filings, California election officials objected to the Justice Department’s requests, arguing that county election offices had neither the authority nor access to federal records needed to verify voters’ citizenship status.
They also said it is impossible to sequester ballots from people on the DOJ list in cases where the ballots have already been processed. Once a ballot’s signature is verified, it is removed from its identification envelope and processed with other ballots, meaning it can no longer be traced back to an individual voter.
Election workers sort ballots during early voting ahead of the midterm elections at City Hall in San Francisco, California, October 21, 2026. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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“That’s true. That’s why we got an emergency court order forcing them to set aside those ballots,” Essayli said. “The ballots have already been sent out, people are filling them out and they’re being returned as we speak. So the crime is happening in real time.”
The DOJ stepped up its push for immediate court action Wednesday, asking the judge to rule on its emergency request by noon Thursday. In Los Angeles County alone, authorities have already processed 331,000 ballots, according to court records.
Essayli’s office filed the suit Oct. 15, about two weeks after California mailed mail-in ballots, including to possible noncitizens on the DOJ’s list, according to the federal government.
When asked why the Justice Department didn’t act sooner, Essayli explained that investigators didn’t know exactly which voters would receive the ballots until they were mailed.
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He said California should cooperate with the federal government to speed up the process of verifying voters’ citizenship.
This would involve providing additional identifying information, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers when available, which federal investigators could cross-check with government databases.
California and dozens of other states treat this information as confidential and have refused to turn it over to the federal government, prompting the DOJ to sue several of them.
In a separate lawsuit from September 2025, the DOJ attempted to compel California to provide its complete, unredacted voter registration database, including names, Social Security numbers, home addresses and voting histories.
In January, a district court sided with California and dismissed the case, calling the government’s request “unprecedented and unlawful.” The DOJ appealed the decision and litigation is ongoing.
Natasha Garcia casts her ballot for the 2026 midterm elections with her daughter Lala during early voting at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder in Norwalk, Monday, October 19, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
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“If California makes available or submits its records, we can quickly pass them through our established systems to determine who is a citizen and who is not,” Essayli told Fox News Digital. “They’re forcing us to do it the hard way, which we’re willing to do because it’s very important.”
He said each person on the current list of 20,000 names was individually reviewed by a federal employee with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations.
California officials, however, questioned the reliability of the DOJ list.
Monica Flores, assistant to the Los Angeles County registrar, said in a court filing that her office conducted a preliminary review of a sample of 200 listing records associated with Los Angeles County addresses.
Of those, 112 were canceled or inactive voter registrations, meaning no ballots were sent to those people for the November election, Flores said.
In this photo, an official absentee ballot, mailed to a Southern California resident before the general election, is seen October 17, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images)
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“Actually, I don’t believe it,” Essayli said. “The information we have indicates that they likely received ballots. So we are asking for the names of the people whose registration they claim was canceled.”
Essayli added that Los Angeles County has not said when those registrations were canceled. He raised the possibility that at least some were canceled after federal officials provided their list to the state.
“If they cancel now based on the records we provided, that’s great news,” Essayli said. “But all that remains to be determined.”
In the sample of 200 people reviewed by Los Angeles County, Flores said that of the records in which place of birth was “significantly reported,” 38.9 percent indicated the person was born in the United States, which she called “strong evidence of citizenship.”
Many people are voting early at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office on October 19, 2026. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
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Essayli also disputed this conclusion, arguing that the birthplace information – much like the citizenship information itself – was provided by registered voters themselves.
“They don’t independently verify any of this information,” Essayli said. “They rely on information provided to them by the person who registered to vote.”
The California Secretary of State’s Office and the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
Essayli said his office is committed to continuing its investigation because “one non-citizen vote is too many.”
“An illegal vote voids the vote of an American citizen. There are many local elections that are decided by very few votes,” he said. “Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections and we intend to enforce this law.”
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