The Justice Department charged 28 lawful permanent residents in California with election crimes and arrested 11 of them.

Twenty-eight criminal complaints are a different record from a list of 20,000 names. The Justice Department filed the cases it says it can take to court and arrested 11 people Monday. California has refused to freeze mail ballots off the larger list, and state officials say the department still has not shown widespread fraud. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said some names on that list of 20,000 may turn out to be citizens.

The Justice Department said Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, that federal agents in California arrested 11 lawful permanent residents who are among 28 people charged in criminal complaints with election crimes. The department said every one of the 28 is a green-card holder. Lawful permanent residents may live in the United States, and they may not vote in federal elections. The department calls the arrests part of Operation Protect the Vote, run with the four U.S. attorney's offices in California. It said the people arrested Monday were expected to make initial appearances that afternoon, and that no pleas would be taken that day. The Los Angeles Times reported authorities said the other 17 would be in custody soon.

The department said the charges include false statements on a naturalization application and, for some defendants, fraudulent voter registration, both felonies with a maximum of five years in federal prison. It said defendants in the Eastern District of California are charged with voting by an alien in a federal election, a misdemeanor with a maximum of one year. ABC News reported that Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter described the cases as some combination of unlawful voting by an alien, a false claim of U.S. citizenship in order to register or vote, and knowingly depriving California residents of a fair election. The department said that, according to court documents, the defendants swore they were U.S. citizens on voter-registration applications, that those applications were approved, and that in many cases they then voted. The Times reported that 21 of the 28 are suspected of casting ballots, some in more than one election, and that none of the 28 is an undocumented immigrant. The Times also reported the cases split as 13 defendants in the Central District of California, six in the Eastern District, five in the Northern District, and four in the Southern District.

The department and the Times both described Omar Alexander Muñoz, 72, a Belizean national living in Commerce. The department said he fraudulently registered to vote in September 2019 by claiming he was a U.S. citizen, then voted in 2020, twice in 2022, and in 2024, and later lied under oath on a naturalization application by saying he had never claimed to be a U.S. citizen. The Times reported he was arrested in a predawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. His daughter, Lliani Orantes, told the Times the family was trying to understand the arrest. She said a brother and a nephew share her father's name, and she asked whether the names had been mixed up. That question is hers. The court has not ruled on it.

The department said the 28 names sit on a list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants it gave California on Oct. 13, with a request that the state set those ballots aside until citizenship could be checked. It said California declined, and that the United States sued. The Times reported the letters went to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and to Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar, with a 48-hour demand, and that the suit asks a court to segregate those mail ballots before the Nov. 3 midterms. ABC News reported Logan's office refused to open a thumb drive the department delivered, password stuck to a note, because the county does not treat that kind of device as secure. McCotter said, according to the department, "Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen," and that California had to verify the larger list before mail ballots are counted. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said California is mailing ballots to noncitizens. The Times reported he also said the cases are not a conspiracy theory.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said the 28 people are a tiny fraction of the state's 23 million registered voters, and that the administration has not shown widespread voter fraud even if the allegations are true, the Times reported. Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn called the arrests voter intimidation and an attempt to undermine trust in the midterms, the Times reported. ABC News reported that when the department previously sent Nevada a list of 185 people it suspected were noncitizens, Nevada officials found that all 185 were citizens. The Times reported McCotter called a zero-noncitizen account incomplete because a larger Nevada list was never vetted, and that he acknowledged the 185 names the state did check, which his department had treated as high confidence, were citizens. He also said some names on California's list of 20,000 may turn out to be citizens, the Times reported. Essayli said the department has charged 113 people across 20 states with illegal voting or illegal registration in the last seven weeks, ABC News and the Times reported. The complaints are accusations. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.