Remedios Alasaas is a 66-year-old Philippines national living in Hawaii. She's now facing federal charges for casting ballots in the 2022 general election and the August 2024 primary. In Coldwater, Kansas — population roughly 800 — Joe Ceballos, a Mexican national, served as the town's mayor. He voted, too. Neither of them were citizens.
They're not alone. Not even close.
The Department of Justice has filed charges against noncitizens registered to vote across eight states — Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Kansas. Approximately 24 noncitizens have been prosecuted in recent months, with more than 90 cases under active investigation. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ's top election enforcement official, framed the scale bluntly: "It isn't just bad policy to let non-citizens vote in federal elections, it's a crime."
The numbers behind the crackdown tell a story the enforcement actions alone can't. A dozen cooperating states have identified between 20,000 and 30,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls — and DOJ officials expect that figure to reach into the hundreds of thousands once all state reviews are complete. Ohio alone referred 597 noncitizens for prosecution. Of those, 138 had actually cast ballots. Virginia found 6,303 noncitizens on its rolls between 2022 and 2023. Texas removed 6,500, and 1,930 of them had a voting history.
U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida, where multiple cases originated, put a finer point on it: "Voting in federal elections is one of the most important rights and responsibilities of American citizenship." His office charged a Cuban national and a Haitian national who voted in 2020, plus a Brazilian lawful permanent resident who voted in 2024.
The individual cases are staggering in their variety. A Chinese national at the University of Michigan turned himself in on two felony charges. Two Pakistani men in New Jersey were indicted for fraudulent voting. An Australian national in Louisiana was arrested. A Mauritanian illegal immigrant in Pennsylvania — marked for deportation since 2002 — voted in every election since 2008. A Canadian man in North Carolina had been voting illegally since 2004 and received a two-month prison sentence for twenty years of fraudulent ballots.
Dhillon acknowledged the enforcement gap that allowed this to build for decades. "We are trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon because there isn't a culture of U.S. attorneys going after these," she told Patriot News Alerts. The DOJ has now filed lawsuits against 30 states plus Washington, D.C., demanding access to voter rolls for citizenship verification.
Michigan's Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson offered the standard Democrat counterargument: "This is a serious issue, one we must address with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer." The scalpel approach produced 15 credible cases of noncitizen voting in Michigan's 2024 election — which raises the question of how many a sledgehammer might find. Pennsylvania's motor voter program alone registered an estimated 100,000 noncitizens. Washington, D.C., allowed 388 foreign nationals to vote in the 2024 general election. Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, called it "an outrage and insult to every American citizen."
Representative Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican, connected the resistance to reform with the persistence of the problem. "Obviously, political parties that want to cheat — they will do what they can to fight to prevent photo ID," Grothman said. The Save America Act, which would impose citizenship and voter ID requirements on federal elections, remains the legislative answer President Trump has been pushing.
Twenty-four prosecutions across eight states. Ninety-plus active investigations. Tens of thousands identified on voter rolls with potentially hundreds of thousands more. A Mauritanian deportee voting for sixteen straight years. A Canadian casting ballots for two decades.
The phrase was always "it never happens." It happened in eight states — and those are just the ones that cooperated.