DoJ Charges 28 Green Card Holders in California Voter Fraud

The Department of Justice on Monday filed criminal charges against 28 green card holders in California, accusing them of fraudulently registering to vote and casting illegal ballots, according to The Guardian.

All 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents — legal immigrants who are not US citizens and therefore not authorized to vote in federal or state elections, the Justice Department said Monday, as reported by The Guardian. Of the 28, 21 are accused of actually casting unlawful ballots, a Justice Department spokesperson told the outlet.

How many defendants are in custody, and what penalties do they face?

Eleven of the 28 defendants had been taken into custody as of Monday, with arrests continuing, according to the Justice Department's statement reported by The Guardian. Prosecutors allege the defendants lied under oath on voter registration applications. The charges include making false statements on a naturalization application and fraudulently registering to vote — felonies that carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison, per the Justice Department's announcement.

How does this case fit into the Justice Department's broader push on noncitizen voting?

Monday's charges mark the latest in a series of actions by the Trump Justice Department targeting alleged noncitizen voting ahead of the November midterms, The Guardian reported. The California case follows a pattern in which federal prosecutors have sought to identify noncitizen registrations across multiple states this year. Democrats and voting rights groups say the pattern amounts to a strategy to sow doubt in the midterm results, according to The Guardian's reporting — a characterization the administration disputes.

Why did the Justice Department sue California over ballot counting?

The arrests came days after the Justice Department sued California, seeking a court order to block the state from tabulating certain ballots in the November midterms, according to The Guardian. Before filing that suit, the department had sent Los Angeles County election officials a thumb drive that it said contained the names of noncitizens allegedly registered to vote unlawfully. The department then gave county officials a 48-hour window to confirm the citizenship status of everyone on that list, The Guardian reported — a timeline election administrators have said is difficult to meet given how voter rolls and citizenship records are maintained.

How common is noncitizen voting, according to election researchers?

Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, The Guardian reported, citing election experts who study the issue. That rarity is central to the dispute over Monday's charges: the Justice Department is treating the 28 cases as evidence of a systemic vulnerability in voter rolls, while critics argue that isolated instances — even when prosecuted — do not establish a pattern large enough to affect election outcomes. Neither side disputes the underlying arithmetic that 28 defendants out of California's tens of millions of registered voters represents a vanishingly small fraction of the electorate; the disagreement is over what that fraction means for election integrity policy.

What do critics say about the crackdown's effect on citizen voters?

Election experts have raised concerns that the Justice Department's broader crackdown efforts could disenfranchise US citizens, according to The Guardian — for instance, if voters with similar names or shared biographical details to flagged noncitizens are mistakenly removed from rolls or face additional verification hurdles close to an election. That risk is compounded, critics say, by compressed timelines like the 48-hour verification window the department gave Los Angeles County. The Justice Department has not publicly detailed, in the material reviewed for this story, how it verified the citizenship status of the 28 defendants before filing charges, beyond stating that signed registration and naturalization documents formed the basis of the false-statement allegations.

The case is likely to intensify ahead of the midterms, given the department's pending lawsuit against California over ballot tabulation and the ongoing arrests tied to Monday's charges. The Guardian noted that 17 of the 28 defendants had not yet been taken into custody as of its report, meaning the final tally of arrests — and any additional charges — could still change in the days ahead.

For continuing coverage of the 2026 midterms and related federal actions, see The Guardian's full report.