Justice Department Charges 28 People in California Voting Cases as Fight Over the State’s Rolls Escalates

The Justice Department announced on Monday, October 19, that it has charged 28 foreign nationals in California with voting and registration crimes, according to reporting by NPR and USA Today — the latest and sharpest escalation in a running fight between the federal government and California over who is on the state’s voter rolls, with early voting for the midterm elections already underway. The charges are allegations. None of them has been proven in court, and the people charged are entitled to the presumption of innocence as their cases move through the federal system. What follows is what federal officials said on Monday, what California officials have said in response, and what the reporting does and does not establish — because on a story this contested, the distance between those three things is the story.

The charges announced Monday

According to USA Today, the Department of Justice charged 28 foreign nationals in California with “various voting and registration crimes, among others,” in an announcement officials made on Monday, October 19. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter described the charges at a press conference, USA Today reported. McCotter said the defendants were charged with “some combination of unlawful voting by an alien, a false claim of U.S. citizenship in order to vote or register to vote, and knowingly depriving the residents of California of a fair and impartial election process.” Those are the charges as federal officials described them; the underlying conduct in each individual case will have to be proven by prosecutors in court, defendant by defendant.

NPR reported that all 28 people charged in California are green-card holders — lawful permanent residents, a status that does not include the right to vote in federal elections — and that all 28 appeared on the list of 20,000 names the Justice Department gave California officials last week, according to Justice Department officials who spoke at Monday’s briefing. NPR also reported an important qualification that cuts against any simple reading of the announcement: a number of the 28 do not appear to have actually voted, according to NPR’s reporting, and some registered to vote more than 20 years ago. NPR reported that many of the 28 are accused of making false statements in their naturalization applications, which ask whether applicants previously registered to vote or claimed U.S. citizenship — a different allegation, on a different timeline, from casting a ballot in the current election.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, of the Central District of California, said 11 of the 28 people were in custody so far, according to USA Today, and that the Justice Department would take the remaining individuals into custody “in the near future.” Essayli said many of the people charged had voted in prior elections, according to USA Today. USA Today also reported that some of the individuals face felony charges and that those arrested were expected to make their initial court appearances on Monday afternoon. Nationwide, according to NPR, Justice Department officials said at Monday’s press conference that the department has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting and registration crimes in the past seven weeks; USA Today likewise reported the nationwide figure of 113 people charged with illegal voting and registration offenses, attributing it to Essayli.

Operation Protect the Vote, and where the charged live

The California cases are part of what, as USA Today reported, federal officials call “Operation Protect the Vote,” which USA Today described as a “coordinated effort” by California’s four U.S. attorneys’ offices. According to USA Today, citing the Central District of California, the people charged include residents of Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Sacramento and San Jose. Some of those charged are alleged to have voted in the 2024 general election, according to USA Today — again, an allegation federal prosecutors will have to prove, not a finding any court has made.

At Monday’s briefing, Essayli addressed the possibility that some registrations could have resulted from error rather than intent, and rejected it, according to NPR. “It’s not something that just happens to you,” Essayli said, according to NPR. Essayli continued, according to NPR: “They either attested to it when they got a driver’s license, or they went out of their way to file a voter registration form, and they swore under oath that they were a citizen.” NPR noted, however, that previous research has shown that when noncitizen voting and registration occurs, it is also often the result of bureaucratic error and not intentional fraud, and NPR pointed to New Jersey, where officials revealed this summer that a software glitch at the DMV had registered more than 6,000 people to vote even though they had indicated they were noncitizens. Whether any of the 28 California cases involves error, intent, or something in between is precisely what the court process exists to determine, and neither NPR nor USA Today reported that any of the 28 cases had been adjudicated as of Monday.

The 20,000-name list behind the cases

To understand Monday’s charges, both NPR and USA Today traced them back to a list. According to USA Today, the 28 people charged are on a list of 20,000 people whom, as USA Today reported, the Justice Department alleges “are likely aliens” registered to vote in California, and that list was sent to officials in California last week, according to McCotter. NPR reported the delivery in more specific terms: the Justice Department delivered a flash drive to Los Angeles County containing 20,000 names and a 48-hour deadline to investigate them, and local and state officials declined to carry out that investigation on that timeline. The federal government then sued California, according to NPR.

California officials have asked the federal government for the specific information behind its conclusions, according to NPR, and have not received it. NPR reported that McCotter said at Monday’s briefing that the 20,000 figure represented the people the Justice Department had the most confidence were noncitizens after the Department of Homeland Security cross-referenced various government databases and other records with identifying information. NPR also reported that a July letter from the Department of Homeland Security to California had alleged the state had a potential of 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls — a far larger figure than the 20,000-name list the Justice Department ultimately delivered, and one NPR presented as part of the open questions about the methodology behind the federal tally and its accuracy. USA Today reported that McCotter said at the press conference that officials have now revealed their methodology and that the federal government welcomes California’s and Los Angeles County’s cooperation despite the lawsuit.

California’s secretary of state, Shirley Weber, responded to the federal demands in writing before Monday’s announcement. According to NPR, Weber wrote to McCotter on October 13: “The extraordinary measures you demand are contrary to both federal and state law.” NPR quoted her letter further: “Withholding ballots from some duly registered voters and segregating and refusing to tabulate voted ballots submitted by others, is an unprecedented suspension — and even denial — of voting rights.” USA Today reported that Weber had previously said she will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians based on an “unsupported” and — as USA Today reported Weber put it — “likely inaccurate” belief that certain voters are likely noncitizens, and quoted her statement that, with less than three weeks before the election and voting already underway, the federal government was, as USA Today quoted Weber saying, “demanding unprecedented measures that threaten thousands of Californians’ right to vote, based on unverifiable information or methodology that you still fail to explain or provide.” Los Angeles County’s registrar-recorder and county clerk, Dean Logan, was named in the federal lawsuit, according to USA Today, and USA Today quoted his statement: “We cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations, nor can we disregard the legal requirements governing our election — and we certainly have no authority to act on records that are outside of our jurisdiction.” NPR reported that Los Angeles County’s assistant county counsel, Peter Bollinger, wrote to McCotter on October 15 that the county was “not authorized to, or are prohibited from, taking the actions requested in your letter under both federal and state law,” and that the same letter noted the federal list included voters from outside Los Angeles County, whose records the county does not maintain.

The lawsuit, the emergency request, and the warnings

Alongside the criminal charges, the Justice Department has pressed its case against California in civil court. According to USA Today, the Justice Department sued California just days before Monday’s announcement, asking the court to stop California from counting vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the upcoming election until it can determine their citizenship status, according to the complaint. NPR reported that the Justice Department also filed an emergency request in federal court — described by NPR as a Monday filing seeking a restraining order — to stop California from processing ballots returned by people on the voter rolls whom, according to NPR, the federal government says are “likely noncitizens.” In that filing, according to NPR, the Justice Department wrote: “Once illegally cast ballots are counted and commingled with lawful votes, the resulting harm may be impossible to remedy.” NPR described the request as unprecedented and especially unusual given that voting is already underway, and reported that California officials have argued that complying with the demand to set those ballots aside would be unlawful, noting the Justice Department has not confirmed that the voters on the list are noncitizens. NPR also reported that both Weber’s and the county’s letters cited the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law that, according to NPR, bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters from the rolls during the 90 days before an election — a safeguard NPR explained is meant to prevent mistakes that could erroneously purge eligible voters right before an election without giving voters time to correct errors. NPR further reported that a half dozen voting and civil rights organizations filed to intervene in the case last week to argue the Justice Department’s demands are unlawful, and that election experts have said the lawsuit seems more about sending a political message or teeing up future challenges than winning in court, given that the Constitution gives states the authority to administer elections.

The dispute escalated personally on Friday, before any charges were announced. According to NPR, McCotter warned California officials in a letter on Friday that they could be criminally prosecuted for knowingly processing ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens. President Trump posted on Truth Social that evening, NPR reported: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” At Monday’s press conference, according to NPR, McCotter said: “This Department of Justice will not look the other way while noncitizens vote in federal elections. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.” Local officials have described the Justice Department’s steps as election interference, according to the reporting summarized by NPR, and NPR reported that local officials and election experts worry the adversarial posture portends further actions aimed at delegitimizing results in this fall’s midterms. Rick Hasen, an election law expert who runs UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, told NPR: “There’s a few things to be worried about. One is the risk of disenfranchising eligible voters. The other is the risk that it further undermines voter confidence in the electoral process by making it seem like [noncitizen voting] is a major problem when it is not. And the third risk is that this is going to be used as some sort of pretext to try to seize ballots or interfere after the election is over.” Hasen also told NPR the charges seemed meant to make noncitizen voting “look like a bigger issue than it is,” and he wrote last week, according to NPR, “I expect this lawsuit to go nowhere.”

The scale of the allegations, in context

Both NPR and USA Today placed the numbers in a wider frame, and the frame matters. According to NPR, noncitizen voting has never been found to be a widespread problem in U.S. elections, even as the current administration devotes significant resources to uncovering the ineligible voting that does occur. California has more than 23 million registered voters, according to USA Today, and more than 154 million Americans cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election. Against those totals, NPR quoted Hasen making the arithmetic plain: “Given that there’s over 20 million registered voters in California, this is quite a small number of allegations. And we don’t know how many of these allegations will even pan out. And so even if all of these were in fact people who were illegally voting, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of voters in California.” NPR also reported that the Justice Department has been announcing handfuls of new charges almost every day as early voting gets underway in many states, and that Dana Lewis, the Republican county recorder for Pinal County, Arizona, told NPR that local officials nationwide are watching what is happening in California and communicating about it, the same way they did when, according to NPR, the FBI raided an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, in January. “When this impacts another jurisdiction, you automatically have to feel that,” Lewis told NPR. Lewis told NPR: “If it’s happening in Georgia, if it’s happening in Colorado or California, we’re all watching.” NPR also reported recent polling suggesting a sizable portion of the American public thinks immigration enforcement will be present at voting locations this fall, despite federal law banning armed federal agents from the polls, and that non-white voters are more likely than white voters to say they fear voting could put them at risk of being questioned by immigration authorities despite being citizens. In an interview earlier this fall with NPR, Los Angeles County’s Dean Logan urged participation anyway: “Don’t be distracted by the litigation. Don’t be distracted by the mis- and disinformation. If you have questions, let us know, let us answer them. But don’t let this keep you from voting.”

Where this leaves California voters, three weeks out, is with two unresolved proceedings running at once. The criminal cases against the 28 will proceed in federal court, where prosecutors bear the burden of proving each allegation and where, as of Monday’s announcement, nothing has been proven. The civil fight over the 20,000-name list — and over whether ballots from people on it can be processed and counted while early voting continues — will proceed on its own track, with the Justice Department’s emergency request pending and California’s objections on the record. For readers following the wider midterm picture, Previously is tracking the early-voting landscape in our look at the midterms with 30 days to go and early voting underway and in our coverage of Florida’s early voting opening for the 2026 general election — two reminders that, whatever the courts decide in California, the election itself is already in motion across the country.

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