issuing grand jury subpoenas<\/a> for voter records in California \u2014 suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.<\/p>\nIn July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder\/County Clerk\u2019s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were \u201clikely noncitizens.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Weber and Logan balked at the demand \u2014 arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election \u2014 the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n
In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters\u2019 citizenship can be verified \u2014 again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election \u2014 including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning \u2014 until the voter\u2019s citizenship status can be determined,\u201d federal attorneys wrote.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration\u2019s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged \u2014 and even those it\u2019s charged \u2014 has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.<\/p>\n
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are \u201cunreliable.\u201d He wrote that the Justice Department\u2019s demands on California risk \u201cdisenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ\u2019s track record, the lion\u2019s share will be eligible voters.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent \u201c.0001% of California voters,\u201d and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 \u201craises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was \u201cthe ceiling,\u201d while \u201c20,000 is the floor\u201d \u2014 with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there\u2019s not inconsistency between those numbers. They\u2019re just looking at different levels of confidence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a \u201cfalse storyline,\u201d in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted \u2014 and found to be citizens \u2014 were those the federal government had held \u201chigh confidence\u201d in being noncitizens.<\/p>\n
How the Justice Department zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals in California also was not entirely clear.<\/p>\n
U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber\u2019s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided \u201crelevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not \u201cbased on assumptions or a single piece of information,\u201d but required \u201cthorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.<\/p>\n
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. \u201cThis is not a conspiracy theory,\u201d Essayli said. \u201cThis is not made-up stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Essayli highlighted the case of 72-year-old Omar Mu\u00f1oz from Belize, who was arrested in a predawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019 and voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.<\/p>\n
In federal court downtown late Monday, Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.<\/p>\n
She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father\u2019s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. \u201cDid the names get misconstrued?\u201d she wondered.<\/p>\n
McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s ahead<\/p>\n
Federal officials said their work \u2014 dubbed \u201cOperation Protect the Vote\u201d \u2014 would continue through the election and beyond.<\/p>\n
Essayli said California\u2019s own process for verifying voters\u2019 citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have \u201cno idea who is a citizen,\u201d but also know \u201cthey have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak\u201d and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, \u2018We don\u2019t believe you and we\u2019re not even going to look at it,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThat is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCotter said there \u201cmay be some names\u201d on the list of 20,000 flagged voters \u201cwho, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.\u201d He said federal authorities are \u201cnot perfect,\u201d which is why they\u2019ve asked California officials to work with them. \u201cWe could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the timeline \u2014 amid an ongoing election \u2014 was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. \u201cIt\u2019s an emergency of their own creation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":888231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,18054,10584,2356,360249,10071,139198,372506,98528,372503,3,372504,3590,13109,372505,644,21,19,22,20,25,24,44711],"class_list":["post-888230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-ballot","tag-bill-essayli","tag-california","tag-california-official","tag-department","tag-federal-authority","tag-feds-arrest","tag-l-a-county","tag-mccotter","tag-news","tag-noncitizen-voter","tag-people","tag-state","tag-state-election-official","tag-trump-administration","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-voter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/888231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}