LOS ANGELES —
Federal authorities charged more than two dozen foreign nationals in California on Monday as part of a statewide sweep targeting people who authorities say illegally registered or voted in U.S. elections.
The arrests are part of a Trump administration effort to suppress non-citizen voting ahead of next month’s midterm elections, even though data shows the problem is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of elections.
Federal officials on Monday blamed California officials for the alleged crimes, accusing them of making it easier for non-citizens to vote through inadequate maintenance of voter rolls and hiding it from the public. The accusations intensified a simmering voter rolls fight that surfaced last week when the Justice Department sued California officials and warned that local election workers who knowingly processed or tabulated ballots submitted by non-citizen voters risked investigation and possible prosecution.
The Justice Department said the 28 people charged in an operation dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” are legal permanent residents — but not U.S. citizens eligible to legally vote. They are accused of crimes including making false statements on a naturalization application and submitting fraudulent voter rolls.
“This is doing real damage to real elections and to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, acting assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said at a news conference in Los Angeles.
Rob Bonta, California’s Democratic attorney general, said Monday that there was no widespread voter fraud in California and that while “one-off” examples of voter fraud are possible, those cases are “just a drop in the ocean” given that the state has 23 million registered voters.
Bonta said he expects his state to prevail in the federal government’s lawsuit, saying the Republican administration “has not provided us with any information about ineligible voters, just a conclusive statement without any evidence to support it.”
California appears to be a hotbed of electoral conflicts
The federal government has made non-citizen voting a priority this year, requiring states to provide detailed voter information, including their dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. While some states have voluntarily turned over the information, the department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to obtain it — lawsuits that have so far failed.
The Justice Department said Monday it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration crimes in recent weeks. He previously said he had charged about 90 people with various types of election misconduct so far this year, including 50 who allegedly voted as non-citizens. There were more than 227 million registered voters in the United States in the 2024 presidential election.
Monday’s operation involved California’s four U.S. attorneys’ offices in what the Justice Department considered a statewide show of force.
Among the dozens of people arrested was a 72-year-old Belize-born man accused of voting illegally in four elections. Dozens of federal agents descended on the man’s residential cul-de-sac in Commerce, a small town in Los Angeles County, to make the arrest. The man was handcuffed in his pajamas and taken into federal custody downtown. Others came out of the house to observe and questioned the number of heavily armed officers present during the arrest, as well as the need for handcuffs.
Several arrests in Northern California
Another person charged is Kamlesh Navnitlal Shah, 67, of Sacramento, an Indian national who the DOJ says fraudulently registered to vote on the day of the November 2024 general election and cast a ballot that day.
Juan Antonio Rivas Garcia, 46, is a Mexican national and also a resident of Sacramento. DOJ officials say he was fraudulently registered to vote in 2018 and 2022, each time falsely claiming under oath that he was a U.S. citizen and had voted in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
The DOJ also listed Giezell Viduya Adawag, 41, of Vacaville, a Filipino national who fraudulently registered to vote on the day of the November 2024 general election, falsely certified that she was a U.S. citizen, and voted in the election that day.
The arrests are the latest in a flurry of activity that has unfolded in heavily Democratic California, which is not generally considered a key battleground state but has a handful of competitive congressional races that could help determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s term.
Last week, the administration sued California to stop it from counting the mail-in ballots of people the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status can be confirmed.
The complaint was filed after California authorities were unsuccessfully given 48 hours to examine a password-protected USB drive containing a list of 20,000 names. The federal government says these are likely non-citizens who received ballots to participate in the Nov. 3 election, although the secretary of state said the administration has provided no evidence to support that claim. The state mails ballots to all registered voters.
McCotter said that number of 20,000 is likely to increase.
“It’s just the ground,” he said.
DOJ accuses California of ‘state-facilitated election fraud’
He said the lawsuit against California was necessary because “state-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable” and accused state officials of creating last-minute urgency before Election Day by not working sooner with Justice Department officials to verify suspected non-citizen voters.
Explaining why it was important to address the issue of non-citizen voting, even though it is rare, he noted that some races in California have been decided by only hundreds of votes.
Bill Essayli, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor, criticized state election officials for failing to cooperate with the department’s requests.
“Why is California refusing to show its voter rolls? » he asked. “What are they afraid of? What are they hiding?”
As part of its lawsuit, the Justice Department filed documents Monday seeking a court order that would require California to void the ballots of suspected non-citizens and independently verify, or in conjunction with the federal government, their citizenship status before tabulating their absentee ballots. The Justice Department requested that the order be issued in time for the Nov. 3 election.
Without this order, the government said, “there is a significant risk that American votes will be diluted.”
Requests for comment sent Monday to the secretary of state and the governor’s office were not immediately returned.
A warning for poll workers
The Justice Department sent a letter Friday warning that state election officials who knowingly process ballots cast by non-citizen voters risk being investigated.
“The legal consequences of facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant. Non-citizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime – and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally illegal,” McCotter’s letter warns.
It adds: “If individuals knowingly count the ballots of individuals identified by federal agencies as non-citizens, they risk becoming complicit in a federal crime. »
The letter is addressed to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and is also copied to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan, putting the entire state on notice.
In response to the letter, Logan said his office is focused on conducting fair and secure elections, while noting that Election Day is only 18 days away.
“The U.S. Department of Justice has chosen to dispute their unverified claims of voting eligibility. At this point, it is best for this issue to be resolved in court,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report from Washington. KCRA 3 staff contributed to this story.
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