The Trump administration is ramping up its efforts to flush out noncitizen voters with next month’s midterm elections approximately two weeks away. On Monday, the Department of Justice filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. The 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents with legal status in the country but are not citizens permitted to vote.
Noncitizen voting is incredibly uncommon, according to data on the issue, and has not been shown to influence the results of races. Not only does the practice create a paper trail, it carries steep penalties. “Federal law prohibits non-U.S. citizens from registering and voting in Federal elections; violators are removable and face up to five years in prison,” Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged in an October 2024 letter. “The evidence is clear that these laws are working as intended — it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.”
That hasn’t stopped members of the Trump administration from upholding the recent DOJ arrests, dubbed Operation Protect the Vote, as evidence of cheating in the midterms. “This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the DOJ, said during a Los Angeles news conference.
The arrests come less than a week after the DOJ sued California and sent officials a list on an USB drive and a handwritten password, demanding to know who on the list was a citizen or not with only a 48-hour window to respond. Dean Logan, the Los Angeles county clerk and recorder, told The Guardian his office refused to review the list, in part because they didn’t consider the USB drive to be secure. “The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” Logan said in a statement.
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“If the regime truly believed California had an illegal voting problem — no such problem exists — they would have taken this action a long time ago, not as Californians are literally casting votes,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, posted on X. “This is all a political stunt to trick people into voting for Prop 39 (which will make it harder for citizens to vote) and to lay groundwork for a coup on January 3 by refusing to seat House Democrats based on bogus “voter fraud” claims.”
Prop 39, also known as the “Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative,” is basically a voter ID law. If passed, it would, among other things, require voters to present a government-issued ID for in-person voting or provide the last four digits of a government-issued ID designated during voter registration for mail-in voting.
Claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting are not new to the Trump administration. It was a strategy that Donald Trump explored in his 2024 presidential campaign, but it was largely dropped once he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris and it became unnecessary to use. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “You can absolutely bet if Trump loses, he will claim there was widespread noncitizen voting without any evidence whatsoever,” Becker told NPR in September 2024. “And that is going to incite anger and potentially violence.”
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