Three foreign nationals in Florida confessed to knowingly casting ballots in federal elections just days before the Fourth of July, the latest in a wave of roughly two dozen noncitizen voting prosecutions the Trump Justice Department has secured in recent months, with approximately 90 more cases under active investigation, Just the News reported.
The cases stretch from Hawaii to New Jersey, from Kansas to Louisiana. A 66-year-old Philippines national on Maui. A Chinese student at the University of Michigan. A Canadian man who had been voting illegally since 2004. Two Pakistani men in New Jersey. An Australian in Louisiana. A former small-town mayor in Kansas who is a Mexican national. Each one got caught. And the Department of Justice says the count is only going to climb.
The crackdown marks a sharp departure from years of institutional passivity. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, described as the top election enforcement official inside the DOJ, told Just the News, No Noise that the administration sent notices this month to all 50 states warning that election officials who knowingly allow noncitizens to vote will face criminal prosecution.
"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."
That is not the language of a department issuing a polite memo. It is the language of an agency that has spent months building cases and now wants the states to understand the rules have changed.
The Florida confessions are among the most straightforward. A Cuban national and a Haitian national admitted to voting in the 2020 federal elections. A Brazilian national, who had become a lawful permanent resident, voted in a 2024 federal election. All three confessed.
U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida put it plainly:
"Voting in federal elections is one of the most important rights and responsibilities of American citizenship. Federal law is clear: only United States citizens may vote in federal elections. These defendants admitted that they knowingly violated that law."
In Hawaii, Remedios Alasaas, a 66-year-old Philippines national living in Maui, was charged last month with illegally voting in the 2022 general election and again in an August 2024 primary. It was the first time in four decades that a foreigner had been charged with voting in a federal election in Hawaii.
In North Carolina, a Canadian man who had lived in the United States since the 1960s was sentenced to two months in prison after pleading guilty to making false citizenship claims to vote in elections going back to 2004. Two decades of illegal ballots, and no one caught it until now.
At the University of Michigan, a Chinese national turned himself in after allegedly registering to vote and casting a ballot in the general election. He faces two felony charges: false swearing to register to vote and attempting to vote as an unqualified elector. Meanwhile, Ohio is advancing a constitutional amendment to permanently require voter photo ID, a measure that could help prevent similar cases in neighboring states.
In New Jersey, two Pakistani men were indicted for fraudulent voting in a federal election. In Louisiana, an Australian national was arrested for illegally voting. And in Kansas, Joe Ceballos, a Mexican national who had served as mayor of Coldwater, pleaded guilty earlier this year to three misdemeanor charges for voting without being a U.S. citizen. He was ordered to report to federal immigration detention.
Ceballos called it "an honest mistake," noting he is a permanent legal resident. But permanent legal residency does not confer the right to vote in federal elections. It never has.
These individual cases are striking, but the DOJ says the real numbers are far larger. Dhillon told reporters that a dozen or so cooperating states have helped the department identify between 20,000 and 30,000 noncitizens on voter rolls. She believes the total will grow into the hundreds of thousands once all state reviews are completed.
The department has also identified hundreds of thousands of dead people still listed as eligible to vote, along with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants on the rolls.
Those numbers draw support from state-level findings elsewhere. Ohio referred 597 apparent noncitizens for possible prosecution after a comprehensive review cross-checking DMV, DHS, Social Security Administration, and federal jury pool data. Of those, 138 had actually cast ballots. That was the highest number of such referrals in recent years, and it came from a single state that chose to look.
Virginia identified 6,303 noncitizens on its voter rolls in 2022 and 2023. Texas removed 6,500 noncitizens, of whom 1,930 had a history of voting, as Fox News documented in reporting on congressional pressure over the issue.
In Washington, D.C., Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton cited a report finding that nearly 400 noncitizens 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. Congress can and should end this practice immediately."
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal organization, has argued that noncitizen registrations are a minor problem overblown by conservatives. But that argument grows harder to sustain as case after case surfaces in state after state, and as officials who once denied the problem begin to acknowledge it.
Michigan's Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson offers a useful case study. She previously claimed noncitizens don't vote in Michigan. Then her own office reviewed the rolls and found 15 credible cases of foreigners voting in the 2024 elections.
Her revised position: "This is a serious issue, one we must address with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer."
Fifteen confirmed cases in a single state is not a number that justifies complacency. It is a number that raises an obvious question: how many more would turn up in states that refuse to look? New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California have been identified as non-cooperating states where a much larger bloc of noncitizens is expected to be found on voter rolls. Multiple blue states, and some red ones, are fighting in court to block the DOJ from examining their rolls at all.
The administration has responded by filing lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking access to voter roll data after those jurisdictions declined to provide it voluntarily, Newsmax reported. Those DOJ letters gave election officials five days to explain how they would comply with federal voter eligibility requirements and maintain clean voter lists.
That legal fight is playing out alongside a Biden-appointed judge's decision to halt a Trump voter verification system designed to clean state rolls, a ruling that underscores just how fiercely some corners of the judiciary are resisting federal oversight of voter eligibility.
The mechanics are not mysterious. State "motor voter" programs at DMVs have long been identified as a weak point. Pennsylvania's program alone inadvertently allowed approximately 100,000 noncitizens to register to vote, the New York Post reported in a detailed investigation of how illegal immigrants from Africa, India, and China ended up casting ballots. One Mauritanian illegal immigrant marked for deportation since 2002 allegedly voted in every U.S. election since 2008 as a registered Democrat before being arrested in Philadelphia.
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Post: "The reality is aliens are voting in American elections... It's way worse than the left says, but it's way better than some others say."
That's a fair summary of where the evidence stands. This is not a conspiracy theory about millions of fraudulent votes swinging a presidential election. But it is also not the trivial, one-off anomaly that progressive groups have spent years describing. It is a systemic failure, one that compounds every year that voter rolls go uncleaned and registration systems remain porous.
Dhillon herself acknowledged the scale of the challenge with unusual candor: "We are trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon because there isn't a culture of U.S. attorneys going after these."
President Trump is pushing the U.S. Senate to pass the Save America Act, which would impose citizenship and voter ID requirements on all federal election voters. The Senate has been described as reluctant to move on the bill.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican, told Just the News that the resistance is telling:
"Obviously, political parties that want to cheat. They will do what they can to fight to prevent photo ID in those states. 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."
Grothman noted the absurdity of the objection: "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."
The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project has made a related point. As Mike Howell put it in the Washington Examiner: "The reason why the Left loves to point to the absence of prosecutions is because they fought tooth and nail to make a vote-by-honors system while simultaneously flooding this country with foreigners."
That logic is hard to argue with. For years, the low prosecution rate was cited as proof the problem didn't exist. Now the DOJ is actually prosecuting, and cases are turning up in Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, Louisiana, and D.C. The absence of enforcement was never evidence of absence. It was evidence of indifference.
Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Mullin has not ruled out ICE presence at polling places and has defended citizenship checks ahead of the 2026 midterms, a sign the administration views election integrity enforcement as a whole-of-government priority, not just a DOJ project.
The 90-plus cases still under investigation will likely produce more charges in the months ahead. The lawsuits against non-cooperating states will grind through the courts. The Save America Act faces an uncertain path in the Senate. And the midterm elections are approaching.
Noncitizens who vote in federal elections risk not just criminal prosecution but the loss of any pathway to citizenship and the ability to remain in the country. That is the law. The question has always been whether anyone would enforce it.
For the first time in a generation, someone is. The results so far suggest the problem was never as small as its defenders claimed, and the only way to know how big it really is would be for every state to open its rolls to review. The states fighting hardest to keep those rolls closed should be asked a simple question: what are they afraid the DOJ will find?
