A federal grand jury in Minnesota has indicted 10 lawful permanent residents on charges that they voted as noncitizens or falsely claimed U.S. citizenship in order to vote, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. The conduct alleged in the cases runs from the November 2022 general election through the state's Aug. 11 primary, when one of the defendants is accused of casting a ballot.
Attorney General Todd Blanche presented the cases at a news conference at the Justice Department alongside Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota. "The law is clear, only American citizens may vote in American elections, and enforcing this law is fundamental to our democracy," Blanche said in the department's announcement. "That should not be a partisan concept."
The grand jury returned the indictments separately on Sept. 24. Nine of the defendants made their first appearances before a federal magistrate judge on Monday or Tuesday, and the 10th was scheduled to appear in federal court in Massachusetts on Wednesday. The cases grew out of an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations.
The defendants are citizens of Liberia, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ghana, Lithuania and South Africa, with Liberians accounting for three of them, and they range in age from 43 to 78. Together they face nine counts of voting as a noncitizen and nine counts of falsely claiming citizenship to vote. Seven are accused in connection with the Nov. 5, 2024, general election. A Lithuanian woman is charged only with voting in November 2022, and a Liberian woman only with falsely claiming citizenship when she registered in October 2024. The defendant accused of voting in this year's primary, a 63-year-old Ghanaian man, faces three counts: voting in that election and falsely claiming citizenship both then and in October 2024.
Falsely claiming citizenship to vote is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, while voting as a noncitizen is a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine. The department noted that an indictment is merely an allegation and that every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
"Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences, including criminal charges and deportation," Mullin said. Rosen called voting "a privilege of American citizenship" and said his office will prosecute any noncitizen who swears to be a citizen in order to get a ballot. At the news conference, he attributed the alleged crimes to "a general tolerance for fraud" in Minnesota.
Blanche tied the Minnesota cases to a wider tally. He said the department has charged more than 90 people with voter-related fraud offenses since President Trump returned to office, including 50 in the past five weeks, and officials contrasted that total with 13 similar cases brought during the four years of the Biden administration. Mullin said Homeland Security Investigations has made 100 administrative arrests and 53 criminal arrests and secured 37 indictments and 10 convictions related to illegal voting, and he put the number of active investigations at more than 1,600. "We're just getting started," he said.
"Elections today are often decided by a small number of votes, and that's why these investigations and prosecutions matter," Blanche said. He also voiced frustration that news organizations had not taken the department's election fraud prosecutions seriously.
The announcement came less than five weeks before the midterm elections, as Trump continues to press the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. Mullin did not say how his department would use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE, to check voters' eligibility before November. The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the administration may use the database for voter-eligibility checks while litigation continues.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, read the cases differently. His office said in a statement that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in the state and that it had complied with subpoenas for records in these cases. "These indictments affirm the fact that noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare crime," the statement said. "If these indictments result in convictions, that will amount to ten individuals over a period in which around 8.5 million votes were cast in Minnesota."
State court data give a sense of scale. Minnesota Judicial Branch records show 57 charges of ineligible voters knowingly voting filed statewide from 2021 through 2025, and 14 of them ended in convictions, while more than 3.2 million votes were cast in Minnesota in the 2024 general election alone. Nationally, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has catalogued 100 cases of noncitizen voting from 1982 to 2025, and the Brennan Center for Justice has put the incidence of suspected noncitizen voting at 0.0001 percent.
At least one defendant was already being prosecuted by the state. A 69-year-old South African national was charged in Isanti County last year with two counts of knowingly voting as an ineligible voter. According to a criminal complaint in that case, she voted in 2022 and 2024 and filled out paperwork to inactivate her voter record after an election official told her she was ineligible, and county election administrators referred the matter to the sheriff's office. A plea hearing is scheduled for Oct. 7. The federal indictments do not say where any of the defendants registered or how they were able to cast ballots.
At least three of the Minnesota defendants have pleaded not guilty, the Guardian reported, and an attorney for one defendant declined to comment. The newspaper counted at least 24 people charged with similar offenses in 10 states since early September, most of them lawful permanent residents, and called Wednesday's announcement the sixth of its kind this month.