The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday accused 10 people who are not U.S. citizens of voter fraud offenses in Minnesota.
The charges include nine counts of illegal voting by a non-citizen and nine counts of making a false claim of citizenship to vote, according to Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Blanche made the announcement at a White House press conference. He said the 10 accused illegally voted in the general elections of 2022, 2024 and the August 2026 primary. The people charged are citizens of Brazil, Ghana, Bosnia, Lithuania, Germany, Canada, South Africa and Liberia.
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“Voter fraud erodes a public’s trust in our electoral system and it’s vital to our democratic process that we do everything we can to restore that trust,” he said.
Since President Trump took office again in 2025, the Department of Justice has charged 90 people with voter-related fraud offenses, including 50 people in the last five weeks.
“In Minnesota, if you’re not a citizen, do not try to vote. We will prosecute you. If you’re convicted, you’ll face jail time and consequences,” said U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his office is currently investigating 1,600 cases of alleged voter fraud.
According to the DOJ, a conviction for falsely claiming citizenship in order to vote carries a maximum prison term of five years. Voting as a foreign national is a misdemeanor, and carries a maximum prison term of one year.
“Minnesota is widely known for outstanding voter participation, election security, and overall election administration. These indictments affirm the fact that noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare crime. If these indictments result in convictions, that will amount to ten individuals over a period in which around 8.5 million votes were cast in Minnesota,” the Secretary of State’s Office said.
Also during the press conference, Blanche said his office filed a judicial misconduct complaint against federal judges in Minnesota who recently spoke to the New York Times about Operation Metro Surge and the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders.
Blanche said the claims in the article were “not even true and blatantly false,” and asked the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to conduct an investigation and said the judges should recuse themselves from any case involving the Department of Homeland Security.
Rebeccah Parks, the public information officer for the U.S. District Court, said the judges “were acting well within the ethical rules.”
Professor Richard Painter at the University of Minnesota Law School agrees, saying the judges will likely move forward with their caseload.
“There’s no grounds for an ethics complaint when a judge is not talking about a pending case,” Painter said. “These judges were simply speaking their minds about what they thought about the conduct of the U.S. government before their courts.”
Attorney General Keith Ellison said Blanche’s comments were a “desperate and dangerous attack on American judicial independence.”
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