DOJ charged 28 green card holders in California with election crimes. California officials dispute the federal voter-list request.
The Justice Department announced Monday that it has charged 28 foreign nationals in California with election-related federal crimes, including fraudulently registering to vote. Eleven of them were arrested the same day, the department said.
All 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, who are not U.S. citizens and not permitted to vote in U.S. elections, the department said. The charges include making false statements in a naturalization application and, for some, fraudulent voter registration. Both are felonies carrying a maximum of five years in federal prison. Defendants in the Eastern District face the misdemeanor of voting by an alien in a federal election, which carries a maximum of one year. According to court documents, the defendants lied under oath on voter registration forms that they were citizens, and many voted in recent elections. Prosecutors say they later denied on naturalization paperwork that they had ever claimed citizenship or registered to vote. The defendants range in age from 30 to 72 and come from countries including Belize, India, Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines. They include Omar Alexander Muñoz, 72, a Belizean national living in Commerce, California. Prosecutors allege he registered to vote in 2019 and voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and in 2024. The department said the charges are accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent. Those arrested were expected to make initial appearances Monday afternoon, and no pleas were to be taken.
The cases are part of “Operation Protect the Vote,” a coordinated effort among California’s four U.S. Attorney’s Offices. The department said it gave California a list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants on Oct. 13 so their mail-in ballots could be set aside until their status was confirmed. California declined, and the federal government sued the state on Oct. 15. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said all 28 defendants appear on that list and that California must verify the citizenship of those registrants before mail-in ballots are counted. He said the Department of Homeland Security built the list by cross-referencing California’s voter rolls with other government databases. It then removed anyone with evidence of citizenship, he said, and verified the remaining names manually.
California officials characterize the request as legally baseless and a last-ditch effort to intervene in the state’s election, ABC News reported. The Los Angeles County clerk, Dean Logan, said the county would not open the thumb drive the department provided because it conflicts with data privacy and security protocols. He said the drive came with a password on a sticky note and that the department’s letter did not specify the number of individuals involved. ABC News reported that the department has lost more than two dozen straight court cases over the past year in efforts to compel states to hand over voter rolls. The department previously sent Nevada a list of 185 possible noncitizens, and Nevada officials determined that all were lawful citizens.
McCotter did not rule out prosecuting election workers who processed registrations for people suspected of being noncitizens, citing the legal doctrine of aiding and abetting. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said the department has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting or registration in the past seven weeks. Experts say noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare, ABC News reported, though President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have called it a pressing threat. More than 16 million votes were cast in California in the last presidential election.
Information for this report was provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and ABC News.