The Trump administration’s threats against states over alleged noncitizen voting have reached a crescendo just eight days from the midterm elections, with Justice Department officials claiming such cases have risen to “emergency” proportions in California.
But MS NOW has found the number of federal prosecutions based on allegations of noncitizen voting remains low in the state — and across the country.
Three weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department sent California a password-protected thumb drive that identified more than 20,000 individuals it believed to be noncitizens registered to vote in the state.
The delivery came with a warning: It wasn’t just noncitizen voters the DOJ would come after; anyone who had participated in tabulating that ballot — including state officials or poll workers — would be seen as aiding and abetting an offense and criminally liable.
And last week, DOJ and Homeland Security officials were in Los Angeles to announce 28 criminal cases against lawful permanent residents, each of whom, officials said, appeared on the federal list of 20,000 likely noncitizens registered in California.
But those 28 announced cases represent just over one-tenth of 1% of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” who DHS claims are registered to vote in California, which highlights how infrequently Trump’s DOJ has filed criminal charges against noncitizens for election-related crimes in the state. Put another way: The 28 individuals charged in California represent .0001% of the state’s 23 million registered voters.
An MS NOW review of the charging documents that have been made public also reveals that some of the election-related charges loudly touted by DOJ officials in press conferences and on social media appear to have been quietly dropped.
In another threatening letter to county election officials on Friday, the Justice Department continued to claim that it had charged “28 aliens for unlawful voting and registration offenses.” Federal court records show that in five of the California criminal complaints, the charge for “fraudulent voter registration” had been crossed out with a red line, with the initials of the corresponding Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent who brought the complaint.
Those five individuals now appear to be charged only with the crime of making a false statement under oath in a naturalization application, not with unlawfully registering to vote or voting, said Samantha Trepel, a former Justice Department prosecutor, who reviewed some of the charging documents.
After reading the charging documents filed by the HSI agents, Eric Balliet, who spent more than 20 years at that agency when he worked for ICE, told MS NOW that based on his experience the federal judge overseeing some of the cases likely struck down the election-related charges.
“Facts and transparency matter. If judges are not finding sufficient probable cause exists in nearly 1 in 5 of the voter fraud cases that are presented to them, then that is a problem,” said Balliet, who served at the Department of Homeland Security across multiple administrations, including during President Donald Trump’s first term. “That shows the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure remains intact.”
Balliet added that the dropped election-related charges at this stage show “a lack of familiarity of the elements of the crime that the agents are investigating,” adding that it is not the fault of the HSI agents, because “they were never trained or provided legal guidance on what is required to pursue these charges.”
The Justice Department could bring back the election-related charges in those cases at a later date. But asked why the voting-related charges were dropped in some of the cases, Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels did not provide a direct answer. “The 28 noncitizens were charged in criminal complaints with federal crimes,” Pels said. “The department is bringing more election fraud cases every week.”
Of the 28 publicly announced cases, eight are unavailable through a federal records search and unable to be verified as of publication.
The relatively minuscule number of criminal complaints announced in California represents a nationwide trend. An MS NOW review of court records found that between early September 2026 and mid-October, the Trump administration charged 105 people with illegally registering or voting as a noncitizen.
And that small number also directly contradicts Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The president has made frequent unfounded claims about noncitizen voting as pretext for claiming that the midterm elections have been rigged against Republicans, and as justification for possible federal interference, civil rights attorneys and former DOJ officials have warned.
Those experts also say the Justice Department, run by Trump’s former personal lawyer, is attempting to intimidate states into disenfranchising voters of color. Based on the records publicly available so far, the majority of the 28 charged in California were from counties with significant nonwhite populations.
“This administration has one goal only: suppress the votes of Black and Latino voters who they deem expendable,” Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and former assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, told MS NOW. “Historically, the Justice Department has focused on enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”
Noncitizen voting is extremely rare and has never swayed the outcome of an election, according to research from both partisan and nonpartisan organizations. Past convictions are also rare; a Heritage Foundation database found that nationwide between 2000 and 2025 there were 71 criminal convictions of noncitizens for unlawfully voting.
Asked if the DOJ was worried its actions could result in the disenfranchisement of American citizens — as some have already been incorrectly counted in the Trump administration’s lists of alleged noncitizens — Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, said “no.”
“Every action the department has taken to protect the integrity of this year’s elections is grounded in the law and being litigated in open court,” Pels said. “Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote and that every lawful ballot is counted.”
The Justice Department has made no secret that California is in its crosshairs, filing a new lawsuit alleging that the state has ignored the federal government’s urgent requests that it verify the citizenship of the 20,000 individuals, refuse to mail them ballots and segregate any that are returned.
A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held a rare Sunday afternoon hearing on the DOJ’s demand that California segregate ballots the administration claims are from alleged noncitizens. The judges on the federal appeals court appeared ready to reject the Justice Department’s effort. A federal judge in Santa Ana, California, has scheduled a hearing on the lawsuit for this week.
Pressed on the timing by MS NOW, the Justice Department did not directly answer why it waited for months to send California any list of suspected noncitizens to the state. The DOJ first alleged in July that California had more than 190,000 potential noncitizens on its voter rolls but did not send a list of individuals to the state until Oct. 13.
The 20,000 alleged noncitizens are the ones that “have been manually verified to date,” Pels, the Justice Department spokesperson claimed, adding “that number can and will go up.”
But the small number of charges brought to date in California and across the country compared with the more than 150 million Americans who voted in the last presidential election “shows that noncitizen voting is not a widespread problem,” said Trepel, who served as a Justice Department prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division across Republican and Democratic administrations.
“States already have multiple safeguards in place to ensure only eligible citizens can vote, and there continues to be no evidence that noncitizen voting poses a meaningful threat to election integrity,” Trepel said. “Efforts to exaggerate the issue risk undermining public confidence in our elections and could be used to justify removing eligible voters from the rolls.”
The Justice Department itself has repeatedly admitted that the new citizenship lists it is creating to verify a person’s voter eligibility are not perfect and could have errors. Earlier this year, a Justice Department attorney said “certainly a responsible state would not take” the government’s citizenship lists “and then immediately or automatically throw off every single person on their voter rolls who does not appear on that list,” according to a court transcript reviewed by MS NOW.
And during a press conference last week, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter made a similar admission, saying “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect.”
“These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens,” McCotter said.
The top federal prosecutor in California, Bill Essayli, described the department’s lawsuit against California as “an emergency and we expect the courts to treat it as such.”
Meanwhile, the White House continues to defend the noncitizen voter hunt. A White House spokesperson called it “decisive lawful action to protect our elections.”
David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who now advises Republican and Democratic election officials across the country, said the Trump administration was targeting California and spinning a false narrative about widespread noncitizen voter fraud because “they are failing at everything they try. This is desperation and it will fail.”
“This administration has spent 21 months using all of the resources of the federal government to try to manufacture evidence to support the president’s lies about widespread noncitizen voting,” Becker said. “In all that time they have charged only a few dozen. Every time their claims are subjected to scrutiny, they fall apart, revealing an infinitesimally small number of noncitizens accidentally on the lists.”
California officials, for their part, have questioned whether the data supplied by the DOJ is in fact verifiable or even usable. Claims of noncitizens on voter rolls in other states have quickly fallen apart, as in the case of Nevada, which found that every person the Trump administration accused of being a noncitizen on its voter rolls was in fact a citizen, according to email exchanges between Nevada officials and DHS officials provided to MS NOW.
In Los Angeles County, where the Justice Department claims more than 7,000 noncitizens are registered to vote, the election officials found that some of the people on the list have a listed birthplace in the United States, a strong indicator that they are citizens. In a sampling of the suspected noncitizen list, LA County County Registrar Dean Logan said, officials also found that some had no voting history and that others had canceled their voter registrations.
Still, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters on Thursday that the Justice Department had not ruled out pursuing legal action against other states before the election.
“There’s a number of states that we’re looking at,” Blanche said. He said that it was “never our intention to improperly interfere with elections” or a state certification process.
“But you know, to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that,” Blanche added, “of course I’m not going to say that.”
The post As the DOJ amps up threats against noncitizen voting in California, the number of cases brought there — and across the country — remains low appeared first on MS NOW.
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