DOJ Crackdown Reveals More Noncitizens Charged with Illegal Voting

A small town Kansas mayor born in Mexico. A Filipino senior citizen living in Hawaii. Two Pakistani men residing in New Jersey. An Aussie in Louisiana. And a Chinese student studying at the University of Michigan. They all have one thing in common.

Each has been charged in the last year with illegally voting in U.S. federal elections as foreigners, part of a sudden wave of prosecutions led by the Trump Justice Department for a crime that used to be among the rarest in the federal court system.

The Trump Justice Department has secured about two dozen non-citizens voting arrests, prosecutions or convictions in the last few months alone, with about another 90 more cases under investigation, officials told Just the News. And all 50 states were sent notices this month that election officials can and will be prosecuted too if they allow non-citizens to vote.

“It isn’t just bad policy to let non-citizens vote in federal elections, it’s a crime. And this Department of Justice will intend to prosecute that crime if these election officials, having been informed that they are non-citizens on the voter rolls, knowingly allow those people to vote, enable their enrollment on the voter rolls, are passive in the face of this knowledge, etc. This is not some idle threat,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told the Just the News, No Noise television show.

DOJ officials have found three major problems in policing states’ voter rolls ahead of the 2026 election: hundreds of thousands of dead people still eligible to vote, tens of thousands of illegal aliens on the rolls, and scores of foreigners having gone beyond registering to, in fact, vote in a federal election, which is illegal.

Dhillon, the top election cop inside the DOJ, believes the number of foreigners illicitly voting in elections is probably higher but has been frustrated that U.S. Attorney offices across the country haven’t made illegal voting a larger priority until just recently.

“We are trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon because there isn’t a culture of U.S. attorneys going after these,” she explained.

That’s changing with the sudden explosion of cases.

Just before the 250th American birthday celebration, three non-United States citizens in Florida confessed to having knowingly voted in federal elections despite not being eligible to do so. 

Federal law requires voters to be American citizens to vote on the federal level, but some states and cities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.

The three non-citizens voted in Florida and two of them – one from Cuba and the other from Haiti — admitted to voting in 2020 federal elections. The third, a Brazilian, voted in a federal election in 2024 after becoming a lawful permanent resident.

“Voting in federal elections is one of the most important rights and responsibilities of American citizenship,” U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “Federal law is clear: only United States citizens may vote in federal elections. These defendants admitted that they knowingly violated that law.”

In Hawaii, a foreigner was charged for the first time in four decades with voting in a federal election in that state. Remedios Alasaas, 66, a Philippine national living in Maui, was charged last month with illegally voting in the 2022 general election and again in an August 2024 primary.

In North Carolina, a Canadian man living in the U.S. since the 1960s was sentenced to two months in prison after pleading guilty to making false claims about his citizenship to vote in various elections dating back to 2004.

Liberal organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice and many Democrats argue non-citizen registrations are a minor problem but overblown by conservatives. That case has been harder to make as the evidence has begun piling up.

Take, for instance, Michigan Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who long claimed non-citizens don’t vote in her state. Last year, she was forced to admit she found 15 credible cases of foreigners voting in the 2024 elections.

One of those was a Chinese student at the University of Michigan who turned himself in after allegedly being registered to vote and casting a ballot in the general election. The student was charged with two felonies: false swearing to register to vote and trying to vote as an unqualified elector.

Such cases caused Benson to adjust her messaging.

“This is a serious issue, one we must address with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” she said in a statement after the revelations.

In the nation’s capital, one of the most Democrat bastions in the country, a conservative watchdog group reported it found evidence that nearly 400 non-citizens voted in the 2024 general election.

“It is an outrage and insult to every American citizen, and may be a violation of federal law, that D.C. allowed 388 foreign nationals to vote in the 2024 general election,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “Congress can and should end this practice immediately.”

Non-citizens legally in the country place themselves at far more risk than just prosecution if they unlawfully vote. Their pathway to citizenship and ability to stay in the country can quickly be ended.

Take the case of Joe Ceballos, a Mexican national and former mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, who recently was ordered to report to federal immigration detention after pleading guilty to voting illegally as a non-citizen.

Ceballos, earlier this year, pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges for voting without being a U.S. citizen. He said it was “an honest mistake” because he is a permanent legal resident.

The non-citizen registration and voting cases are expected to soar. Trump administration officials like Dhillon believe the total number of foreigners who made it onto voter rolls will grow into the hundreds of thousands when all the reviews of state voter rolls are completed.

Many blue and even some red states are fighting in court to block the DOJ from examining their voter rolls. The dozen or so states that have cooperated in some form have identified 20,000 to 30,000 non-citizens on their rolls, officials said. A much larger bloc of non-citizens is expected to be found in non-cooperating states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, the officials said.

The DOJ push comes as President Donald Trump tries to persuade a reluctant U.S. Senate to pass the Save America Act that would impose citizenship and voter ID on all federal election voters. Some congressional Republicans believe Democrat resistance to the legislation may be a sign of something more sinister.

“Obviously, political parties that want to cheat. They will do what they can to fight to prevent photo ID in those states,” Rep.Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., told Just the News on Friday. “And that is a problem we have here. People are going to continue to feel that elections are not honest, because that’s the only reason I can think of why people would not want photo ID. 

“I mean, my goodness, you need it for things like getting a drug prescription to save your life, and that’s right, but there are politicians, all of whom happen to be Democrats, who feel that photo ID is racist, and so if we, if we tuck it into some sort of spending bill, we think we can at least make a step in the right direction,” he said.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News, Solomon played key reporting and executive roles at some of America’s most important journalism institutions, such as The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill.

Reprinted with permission from Just The News by John Solomon.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.