Eleven people with lawful permanent resident status were arrested in California Monday for alleged voter fraud. Hours later, First Assistant Attorney for California Bill Essayli admitted that they may not have even voted.
The arrests were announced in a Department of Justice press release, which lauded the capture of California residents as part of “Operation Protect the Vote”—an effort to purge voting rolls of alleged “noncitizens” ahead of November’s midterm elections. On October 14, the Trump administration gave the Golden State a flash drive of nearly 200,000 “likely noncitizen” voters it had identified. The method used to identify them remains unclear.
The administration then demanded that the state take “immediate action to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in the upcoming federal election.” If California refused, the administration said it would have “no choice but to seek emergency relief.
In reality, noncitizen voting remains incredibly marginal, and “Operation Protect the Vote” in California is a thinly veiled attempt to target immigrants, spread fear, and restrict voting access in a Democratic stronghold.
“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen,” said acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. “Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week. California refused to look at that list. Today’s charges show exactly what that refusal puts at risk. California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”
“I think the majority did cast a vote in a prior election. Not all, but most did,” Essayli said in a press conference following the arrests, admitting that the DOJ’s “high confidence” list of fraudulent noncitizen voters is not at all foolproof.
These indefensible arrests are the latest chapter in the DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data and throw due process to the wind, using “voter fraud” as a blanket accusation for anyone the Trump administration doesn’t like.