A 55-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia who stole an American citizen's Social Security number, used it to obtain a Florida driver's license and register to vote, and then cast ballots in multiple U.S. elections has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, with deportation to follow.
Carlos Felipe Jaramillo-Grajales drew the federal prison term this week after pleading guilty to a string of charges: making false statements on a U.S. passport application, aggravated identity theft, fraudulently claiming another person's Social Security number as his own, and falsely declaring himself a U.S. citizen in order to vote. A federal judge also ordered his deportation upon completion of the sentence, Breitbart News reported.
The case lays bare a fraud that stretched across years and touched nearly every checkpoint that is supposed to keep noncitizens out of American civic life, a stolen identity, a fraudulent passport application, a state driver's license obtained under false pretenses, and a voter registration built on a lie.
Prosecutors said Jaramillo-Grajales took an unnamed American citizen's Social Security number and used it as the skeleton key to an entire false identity inside the United States. With that nine-digit number he applied for a U.S. passport. He obtained a Florida driver's license. He registered to vote. And he voted, in the 2020 election and, prosecutors said, in several other elections whose specific dates were not disclosed.
The scheme went further. Jaramillo-Grajales married a foreign national while using the stolen Social Security number. That woman had arrived in the United States in September 2003 on a B visitor visa and later secured naturalized American citizenship in August 2017.
The couple divorced in January 2020. After the split, Jaramillo-Grajales left the country for Colombia, still traveling under the stolen identity. His ex-wife also returned to Colombia, where she applied for a fiancé visa on his behalf, this time under his real name. The visa was approved. Jaramillo-Grajales flew back to the United States under his actual identity, remarried his ex-wife in June 2025, and then applied for a green card.
That green card application appears to have been the thread that unraveled the whole arrangement, though prosecutors did not detail exactly how investigators at Homeland Security Investigations first identified Jaramillo-Grajales. What is clear is that the same man who had spent years posing as an American walked into the federal immigration system under his real name, and the two identities collided.
U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe framed the case as a straightforward matter of border integrity and legal accountability.
"Federal immigration laws serve to safeguard our nation's borders and protect the integrity of our government. Those who seek to circumvent, exploit, or break these laws will be prosecuted fully."
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin was blunter about the election-security dimension. He noted that Jaramillo-Grajales's fraud had allowed him to obtain a driver's license and cast votes in American elections, privileges reserved for citizens.
"Because of his fraud, he was able to obtain a driver's license and vote in our elections. Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of [Homeland Security Investigations], along with our federal partners, this criminal is out of our communities and, at the end of his sentence, will be removed from our country. DHS will always fight to protect the integrity of our elections, because election security is national security. Only Americans should be electing American leaders."
Mullin's statement pointedly tied election security to national security, a link the current administration has made repeatedly as the DOJ has charged noncitizens across multiple states in a broader voter-roll enforcement push.
Lost in the political debate over noncitizen voting is the unnamed American citizen whose Social Security number Jaramillo-Grajales stole. That person's identity was used for years, to apply for a passport, to obtain state-issued identification, to register to vote, and to conduct personal affairs including marriage. Prosecutors did not disclose whether the victim had suffered financial harm or other consequences beyond the theft itself.
Identity theft of this kind can shadow a victim for years, tangling credit histories, tax filings, and government records. The fact that Jaramillo-Grajales used the stolen number not just for personal convenience but to infiltrate the voter rolls adds a civic dimension to the damage.
Federal enforcement actions against fraud, whether targeting states with weak prosecution records or pursuing individual defendants like Jaramillo-Grajales, send a signal that stolen identities carry real consequences for the people who steal them.
The three-year sentence covers four distinct federal charges. Aggravated identity theft alone carries a mandatory minimum of two years under federal law. The addition of passport fraud, Social Security fraud, and the false citizenship claim for voting purposes stacked the exposure considerably.
Still, three years for a scheme that spanned more than a decade and corrupted multiple elections will strike many voters as modest. Jaramillo-Grajales voted not once but repeatedly. He did not stumble into a registration form by accident. He built an entire false identity, passport, driver's license, voter card, on the back of a stolen Social Security number belonging to a real American.
Prosecutors did not disclose whether the ex-wife, now his wife again, faces any investigation for her role in applying for the fiancé visa under Jaramillo-Grajales's real name while he had been living in the U.S. under a stolen identity. That question remains unanswered.
The case also leaves open how many total ballots Jaramillo-Grajales cast. Prosecutors confirmed the 2020 election and referenced "several other elections" without specifying which ones or how many. Every one of those votes canceled out the lawful ballot of an actual citizen.
Accountability for public fraud has become a recurring theme in federal enforcement. The DOJ has pursued elected officials accused of wire fraud and state-level leaders whose oversight failures enabled large-scale theft. Jaramillo-Grajales was not an elected official, but his case fits the same principle: when the system catches someone who cheated it, the penalty should match the betrayal.
At every level, from benefit fraud investigations to noncitizen voting prosecutions, the question is whether the federal government is willing to enforce the laws already on the books. In this case, it did.
Jaramillo-Grajales will serve his three years. Then federal immigration officials will put him on a plane to Colombia. Whether that outcome deters the next person tempted to build a life on a stolen Social Security number depends on whether the government keeps treating election fraud as a crime, not a paperwork error.
