The Justice Department announced on Monday that it charged 28 immigrants for voting or registering to vote in a U.S. election, an operation that comes amid a major push by the Trump administration to assert control over the state’s vote-by-mail process.
The DOJ said it began arrests on Monday morning as part of what it called “Operation Protect the Vote.” Eleven people are in custody so far, Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said during a Monday press conference.
“Instead of respecting the laws of this nation, they violated the sacred trust by falsely claiming to be U.S. citizens when they’re not, registering to vote, and some of them voting, and lying about it under oath when they sought another exercise of grace, naturalization,” Essayli said.
He added that all the immigrants arrested are lawful permanent residents, an immigration status that does not allow people to register to vote or to vote in elections.
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California and the DOJ are engaged in a battle over 20,000 people that the agency has identified as possible noncitizen voters. The DOJ sued California last week for not complying with its request to halt or set aside the ballots of those identified.
The administration is now saying that California should not count those 20,000 votes until citizenship is verified, and that election officials who count those votes could be held criminally responsible.
Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general, said during the press conference that the names of all 28 people were on the list sent to California election officials — which was delivered via a password-protected thumb drive, with the password attached on a sticky note.
The correspondence arrived close to two weeks after California began sending mail-in ballots.
But top California officials have remained defiant, with some arguing that the DOJ’s actions during the early voting process is disruptive.
“Their timing is rife with and smacks of and reeks of desperation and bad faith, to do this during an election,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Friday.
California Sen. Alex Padilla sent a letter on Thursday to the DOJ, along with Democratic Sens. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, asking the agency to “reaffirm its longstanding election non-interference policy and rule out any attempt to seize ballots or any other election materials or equipment before voting, counting, and/or certification are complete.”
The administration continues to ramp up its work to prove that noncitizens are voting in large numbers in California. McCotter added that the DOJ is now seeking an emergency motion for relief in the lawsuit filed last week to “set aside and segregate” 20,000 ballots until citizenship is confirmed.
The 28 people charged by the DOJ remain a miniscule percentage of eligible voters in the state. As of Sept. 4, the state of California had over 23.1 million registered voters.
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