The Justice Department on Friday put Los Angeles County and California election officials on notice that knowingly counting mail ballots from people federal agencies have identified as noncitizens could expose them to federal prosecution, pressing them to reconsider their refusal to set those ballots aside. The warning is aimed at the officials who run the count, and it goes beyond the civil lawsuit the department filed against California on Thursday.
"If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime," Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote in a letter sent Friday that the Associated Press obtained first. The letter was addressed to Peter Bollinger, an assistant counsel for Los Angeles County, and copied to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and the county registrar, Dean Logan. It came a day after the department sued the state to keep those ballots from being tabulated until the voters' citizenship can be confirmed, and less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 election.
President Trump weighed in late Friday, posting about the letter on Truth Social with the comment: "They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!"
McCotter rested the warning on the federal law against noncitizen voting in federal elections and on the general aiding-and-abetting statute, according to a Democracy Docket account of the letter. Having received the federal list, he argued, California officials now have "actual notice of noncitizen voting," and no state election procedure protects them from federal criminal law. "The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant," he wrote. The letter also described how the list of more than 20,000 names was assembled, saying it came from "a multilayered, multiagency investigative methodology that relied upon internal immigration records, data matching, supervisory verification procedures, and more," the Washington Examiner reported.
The letter answers the county's refusal to act on the department's original Oct. 13 demand. Los Angeles County said in a statement that it formally responded on Thursday morning, setting out legal and operational objections and pointing out that the list covered people throughout California, not only county residents. County Counsel Dawyn Harrison said that day that the county could not comply because the administration had not explained how the list was made, Reuters reported. McCotter rejected the county's argument that it had no authority to hold the ballots aside, calling temporary segregation "a standard election-administration practice implemented nationwide." He brushed aside the county's appeal to the National Voter Registration Act's 90-day bar on systematic purges, saying the department seeks only a temporary hold on ballots, not the removal of anyone from the rolls. He conceded that some people on the list live outside Los Angeles County, but said that neither that fact nor the workload and the short timeline excused the county from acting.
"The Department strongly urges the County and the SOS to reconsider their positions before taking actions that risk significant federal scrutiny and legal exposure," McCotter wrote. It is unclear how many people the department might try to investigate or charge, the AP reported. Any federal criminal case in the Los Angeles area would be handled by the office of Bill Essayli, the region's top federal prosecutor and one of the officials who filed Thursday's complaint. The Civil Rights Division usually handles the department's civil voting cases, but in California it was McCotter, whose office supervises major criminal enforcement work, who signed the first demand, and his name is on the lawsuit.
The current standoff began when the department gave state and county officials 48 hours to review a password-protected thumb drive holding roughly 20,000 names of people that federal agencies say are likely noncitizens and were mailed ballots. California sends a ballot to every registered voter. Officials did not meet the deadline, and the lawsuit followed. Weber has said the administration has offered no evidence for its claim. Even the department's complaint calls the people on the list "likely noncitizens," and federal officials have asked the state to check for citizens included by mistake before acting on their ballots.
Logan, responding to Friday's letter, said his office was focused on running a fair and secure election. "The U.S. Department of Justice has chosen to litigate their unverified assertions of voting eligibility. At this point, it is best for this to be addressed in court," he said, according to an updated AP report. In his statement after the suit was filed, he had said the department "has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology" behind its assertion that people in its records are ineligible to vote. "We cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations," he said then, adding that the rules for eligibility and ballot processing "cannot be arbitrarily changed midway through an election." Weber's office referred Reuters to an earlier statement in which she said the department's efforts to "unlawfully gain access to states' protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections." The county counsel's office did not immediately respond to Reuters.
The administration has made the pursuit of noncitizen voting a priority this year. The department has charged about 90 people with election misconduct so far in 2026, including 50 accused of voting as noncitizens, according to the AP. At least one earlier federal count did not hold up: in July, the administration said Nevada had 1,500 noncitizen voters on its rolls, and once the names were given to the state, the number of registered noncitizens turned out to be zero. Reuters noted that systems meant to verify citizenship have in some cases mistakenly flagged naturalized citizens as noncitizens, and that studies have found actual voting by noncitizens to be exceedingly uncommon.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, said the letter "ups the ante by threatening election officials with potential criminal prosecution," and he called the escalating demands deplorable in the middle of an ongoing election. Democracy Docket pointed to Supreme Court precedent that aiding-and-abetting liability requires an affirmative act and an intent to help bring about the crime, and to exceptions in the noncitizen voting law for some people who reasonably believed they were citizens.
Ballots are already being cast in California, where more than 23 million people are registered to vote, and a handful of competitive House races in the state could help decide which party controls the chamber for the last two years of President Trump's term.