Six green card holders charged as Trump's DoJ escalates California election fight

The Trump administration's push into California's elections got louder on Monday. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and a close ally of the president, announced six new voter fraud prosecutions against lawful permanent residents — green card holders who are legally barred from casting ballots. Five of the six have been arrested, Essayli said at a press conference, with defendants originally from Mexico, Israel, the Philippines, Canada and Iran.

The charges are narrow. Each defendant faces a single count of making false statements on a naturalization application, based on affidavits alleging they registered to vote unlawfully and then told citizenship officials they never had. Prosecutors say the defendants did cast ballots in recent years, but none is charged with fraudulent voting itself. The maximum penalty is five years behind bars. The complaints were written by Department of Homeland Security agents, no indictments have been filed, and it was not immediately clear whether any defendant has a lawyer.

The details are stark in places. A 52-year-old Canadian defendant, in the US for more than 40 years, is accused of voting unlawfully twice before trying to cancel his registration. A 43-year-old from the Philippines, here since 1992, allegedly voted multiple times since 2020. The rollout follows last month's batch of 28 California charges, which included a pre-dawn, on-camera arrest of a 72-year-old that the DoJ cut into a promotional video — a move former prosecutors and defense lawyers called showy.

All of it is fuel for the DoJ's lawsuit demanding California set aside roughly 20,000 ballots that prosecutors claim may belong to noncitizens. Essayli said the new arrests vindicate that push. But the numbers are tiny against California's more than 23 million registered voters, and an immigrants' rights group that analyzed the government's list said in a weekend filing that over 40% of the flagged names don't appear on state voter rolls at all. County officials have called the lists error-riddled. Asked about it Monday, Essayli conceded the government leaned on 'third-party databases' that 'may not be 100%' accurate while insisting on a 'very, very high confidence rate.'

The courts are not playing along. Multiple judges have rejected the DoJ's ballot demands as unconstitutional, and the US Supreme Court turned down the administration's appeals on Monday. On Friday a federal judge blocked the DoJ from threatening criminal prosecution of election officials who process ballots, describing 'intimidation, threats, and attempts at coercion.' Essayli keeps going anyway — even after a judge ruled last week that he was 'unlawfully' running the US attorney's office without Senate confirmation, a decision the DoJ is appealing.

Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and experts say when it happens it's usually confusion rather than conspiracy. Democrats accuse the DoJ of trying to seed doubt in the midterms before a single result is in. The midterms are now days away, and the next headline in this fight is likely to come from a courtroom.