US ACTING DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL TRENT MACCOTTER: Good morning, I’m Trent MacCotter, the Acting Deputy Attorney General of the United States. With me on the stage, I have Bill Essayli, our amazing First Assistant here in the Central District of California. I also have Adam Gordon, Eric Grant, and Craig Missakian, the United States Attorneys for the other districts in California, and also Kevin Murphy, who’s the Special Agent in Charge of HSI in San Diego.
This morning we’re announcing that the Departament of Justice has charged 28 foreign nationals across the state of California with various voting and registration crimes, among others, in particular, they’re charged with some combination of unlawful voting by an alien, a false claim of U.S. citizenship in order to vote or register to vote, and knowingly depriving the residents of California of a fair and impartial election process. At least eight of these defendants allegedly voted more than once illegally, including some in the 2026 primary. This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County. I can also confirm today that these 28 defendants are on the list of 20,000 that was sent to California and L.A. County last week as part of our ongoing campaign to enlist California in our efforts to clean up their voter rolls and ensure that only citizens vote. As you all are aware, last week the United States filed a civil complaint here in the Central District of California against California and Los Angeles. This morning, just a few minutes ago, we filed an emergency motion for relief asking the court to grant our motion for a TRO and a preliminary injunction and set aside and segregate the ballots of these individuals who are on the list until we can confirm whether they are in fact U.S. citizens. So today’s charges demonstrate why that lawsuit is so important. I want to be very clear what the lawsuit is about. It’s about preventing voter fraud that cancels out the votes of U.S. citizens. Enforcing federal law increases the integrity of elections. It increases confidence in elections. And we didn’t just start with this lawsuit, to be clear. Over the course of the summer, DHS and DOJ repeatedly tried to enlist the assistance of the State of California to ensure that their voter rolls are clean and include only U.S. citizens. We asked California to work collaboratively in that process. We never heard anything back. On October 1st, California started mailing ballots to every single person on his voter roll as required by state law. Last week, as I mentioned, we sent a of 20,000 individuals to the State of California and to L.A. County, individuals for whom we have high confidence to believe that they are not U.S. citizens. But yet they are on California’s voter roll and therefore either already have or soon will receive a mail-in ballot. After we provided that information, California and L.A. didn’t come back and say “No, you’re wrong. These folks are citizens.” They didn’t say, actually “Let’s work together and try to figure out whether they’re citizens.” Instead, L.A. County, in particular, said that they would not even attempt to open the list because of concerns about I.T. integrity. It’s a little bit ironic when a county has more concern about the integrity of their I.T. system than the integrity of their voter roll. So that’s the behavior of the Protester Court last week. When we identified 20,000 very likely non-citizens on the voter rolls and the State and the County do nothing about it, unfortunately, the only recourse is a lawsuit. As Todd Blanche, the Attorney General, put it recently, state-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America. I want to explain a little bit. Here’s a summary of some of the information. I’ll get to some more of it later. I want to explain a little bit in layman’s terms how we got that list of 20,000. So California has a public voter roll that’s available. It doesn’t include everyone’s detailed information, but it has a list of everyone on the voter roll. DHS has that roll, of course, with public. They then enriched and cross-referenced that list of that information with other government databases, other public information to add in more of the kind of personal information, identifying information that State of California should have been providing us from the beginning. Then, that’s just one of many steps. The next step subtracted anybody who had any sort of evidence of actually being a citizen. So we looked at State Department records, passport records, Social Security Administration, alien files. We looked whether someone may have gotten derivative citizenship from a parent, or maybe they were a naturalized citizen. All those people knocked off. What was left was then manually verified by a different part of the Department of Homeland Security. So what are we left with? We are left with 20,000 names who are likely not citizens of the United States, are on California’s voter rolls, almost certainly have been sent or will soon be sent a mail-in ballot, and are not allowed to vote in federal elections, period.
All we ask in our lawsuit, including in the emergency motion we just filed, is that the court order that the ballots of those individuals be segregated so we can determine whether they are citizens. If they are, great. They have a right to vote. It will be counted. If they are not, they do not have a right to vote, and they have committed a federal crime by attempting to do so. Enforcing federal laws, as I said, actually bolsters confidence in elections, despite what some of the pundits may say. And every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen. So think about that: 20,000, and to be clear, that’s just the floor. We’re doing rolling review, DHSs, so the number is likely to grow. Imagine 20,000 people, 20,000 citizens, enough to fill a small stadium. You go and talk to every one of them and say “Well, congrats on voting, but your vote got canceled out by someone who’s not allowed under federal law to vote.” And this exercise, to be clear, is not theoretical. Beyond all the indictments that we’ve got here, which we’ll get to in a little bit, beyond all the indictments we’ve got here, the 100-plus that we’ve done just in the last month or so, all of those, the 20,000 names we’ve sent to California, history shows that elections are often quite close. Here in California, just in 2024, the 13th congressional district was decided by less than 200 votes. We’ve had Senate elections, like in Minnesota, 2008, was decided by 300 votes. Presidential election, 2000, we all remember, decided by about 500 votes. So this is not some exercise in theory. This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens. Just in the last seven weeks alone, the department has now charged 113 people across 20 different states with illegal voting or illegal registration. To put that number in context, in four years, the Biden administration charged 13. That’s not 13 in a month, 13 in a week, 13 in a year. That was 13 in four years total. Every week, we are now surpassing that number. The department will not look the other way while individuals vote, including in elections this year, and cancel out the votes of U.S. citizens. With that, I’ll turn the mic over to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.
FIRST ASSISTANT US ATTORNEY CENTRAL DISTRICT CA BILL ESSAYLI: Thank you, Trent. Good morning, everybody. I’m going to get a little bit more detail about this morning’s operation, Operation Protect the Vote. Today’s part of Operation Protect the Vote, we are announcing charges against 28 noncitizens who illegally registered to vote and many of which actually voted in prior elections. We began arresting these individuals this morning, early this morning. My understanding is at least 11 are in custody so far. The rest will be in custody in the near future. In the last seven weeks alone, the Department of Justice has charged 113 aliens across 20 States with illegal voting and registration offenses. Since the beginning of this Administration, we have charged 156 people with voting fraud related offenses. These are not isolated instances. We are investigating thousands of more similar cases throughout the Nation. The United States is a generous country. Each of our defendants charged in the Central District was granted lawful permanent resident status. 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. Lies have consequences. Voting is the essence of our citizenship. Illegally attempting to infiltrate and influence our political determinations is a crime. It’s a State crime and it’s a Federal crime. For those who are seeking Citizenship, the questions on their Naturalization papers were clear. Question: have you ever registered to vote? And second question: have you ever falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen? The defendants in our case here in the Central District swore under penalty of perjury that they had done neither. Both statements were false. Today, we have arrested many of those aliens, some of whom voted numerous times and some of them actually have violent criminal histories as well. One of the defendants, Omar Alexander Munoz, here’s a list of the defendants that are being charged today as part of this operation. One of the defendants we charged this morning, arrested this morning, Omar Alexander Munoz, a Belizean national living in Commerce, has a long criminal history including narcotics possession and grand theft convictions. After swearing that he is a U.S. Citizen to register to vote back in 2019, he voted four times in Federal and State elections from 2020 through 2024. Early this year, he filed an application to become a U.S. Citizen, again lying under oath that he’s never claimed to be a U.S. Citizen and that he never registered to vote or voted in a Federal, State, or local election in the U.S. Again, all false statements. Those are felony charges and he’s been charged and will make his appearance this afternoon in Federal Court. One other example, Amandeep Kaur is an Indian National living in Rancho Palos Verdes. He registered to vote in 2022 swearing under penalty of perjury that he’s, I’m sorry, she, that she’s a U.S. Citizen. Last year, she had the audacity to go to a polling place in person, again declaring under penalty of perjury that she was a U.S. Citizen and submitted her vote in person. She then applied to be a U.S. Citizen this year, again lying under oath. When interviewed last month by a Federal Agent, she again lied and said she never registered or voted in any prior elections. Again, as the Deputy Attorney General said, this is not a theory. This is not a conspiracy theory. This isn’t made up stuff. These are facts. New Jersey just recently announced that they discovered at least 6,600 non-citizens who were registered to vote on their voter rolls. They admitted it. California, several years ago, also admitted through an audit that non-citizens were being registered to vote at the DMV. That’s California’s own audit. That’s not us, that’s them. And so when we submit a list of 20,000 non-citizens to California, that we are pretty sure are non-citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the State is “We don’t believe you, we’re not even going to look at it.” That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit in non-citizens voting in our elections. And as they were warned last week, not only is it a civil violation, but they could also face criminal consequences for that conduct if they knowingly process ballots from non-citizens once we’ve informed them who the non-citizens are. Again, these cases are only a glimpse into our efforts to prioritize election integrity. There are many more cases in the works. We are focused on this case that we have filed last week in the TRO. We have an election coming up next month. Our biggest priority is to safeguard the integrity of the election. Elections belong to American citizens. Even if one non-citizen votes in an election, that is a violation of the Constitutional Rights of every Voter in California who has a legal right to have their vote be counted equally and not diluted by non-citizens. We’re going to take some questions at the end. I want to hand it over now to my colleague, Craig Missakian, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.
CRAIG MISSAKIAN: Good morning and thank you for being here.
The right to speak your mind peacefully, the right to vote and have your voice heard in your Government, these are the cornerstones of our Democracy. Protecting the integrity of our elections is an important part of what we at the Department of Justice and at the U.S. Attorney’s Offices here in California have committed to do. That means doing two things: It means protecting the right of everybody who has the legal right to vote, and it also means prohibiting ineligible voters from voting in an election. We don’t care who you vote for. What we care about is making sure that every legitimate vote is counted, that we ensure a level playing field for all Americans. But when someone who is ineligible to vote casts a vote in an election when they do not have the right to do it, it throws that playing field off. It’s just like having your vote or your neighbor’s vote not counted at all. And that’s why the four districts here in California who are represented here with me today came together to launch this effort. Working with information provided by Homeland Security and comparing it to voter information that we subpoenaed from the California Secretary of State and from various counties within our individual districts, we were able to identify individuals who allegedly registered to vote and voted when they had no right to do so. This operation will remain in place through the election and beyond. The American people are entitled to expect two things from their Department of Justice: That we will take violations of federal law, all federal law, seriously, and that we will apply that law and enforce that law fairly and impartially. By bringing these charges to you today, we make good on both of those promises. I’d now like to introduce Kevin Murphy, Special Assistant in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego.
KEVIN MURPHY: Good morning. I’m Kevin Murphy, Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego. Today’s coordinated enforcement actions across California demonstrate HSI’s commitment to protecting the integrity of the election process and enforcing federal law. Working with our federal partners, HSI Special Agents conducted arrests arising from voter fraud investigations that were developed following a thorough evidence-based investigation. Election integrity depends on public confidence that each lawful vote is protected and that allegations of criminal conduct are taken seriously. HSI brings extensive experience to these investigations, including expertise in identity fraud, document fraud, false statements, and other complex offenses that may affect the integrity of government processes. I want to emphasize that HSI’s focus is investigating criminal conduct. Our agents pursue credible allegations, follow the evidence, and conduct their work professionally and in accordance with law. These investigations are not based on assumptions or a single piece of information. They require thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts. I want to thank the United States Attorney’s for their essential partnership, legal guidance, and assistance throughout these matters. Their close coordination with HSI has been critical to today’s successful operations and to ensuring that these cases proceed through the appropriate judicial process. I also want to recognize the HSI Special Agents, analysts, and support personnel whose diligence and professionalism made these coordinated actions possible. HSI will continue working with our prosecutorial and law enforcement partners to uphold federal law and protect the integrity of lawful elections. Thank you.
TRENT MACCOTTER: Thanks, Kevin. We’ll take a few questions now.
JOURNALIST 1: I have two questions. I’m a sophomore with the Associated Press. The first question is, you said initially, Mr. MacCotter, that the California Secretary of State’s office didn’t respond in July. That office is saying that they did respond and they asked for methodology and kind of the sourcing of your data. Can you help us reconcile this?
TRENT MACCOTTER: Yeah, well, so I mean, they may have sent some letter. It’s probably like the letter they sent me this week. That’s like a letter that’s kind of like “We disagree with you. We don’t take you seriously. We’re not even going to open the drive type of response.” I think it’s been pretty clear that our door is open. We want to collaborate with California and now with L.A. County as well. We’ve now revealed the sourcing here, the methodology. I think it’s pretty solid. We still welcome their cooperation, by the way, even though we filed the lawsuit. We’d be happy to have them work with us.
JOURNALIST 1: So they said that you guys didn’t respond to a direct question about their methodology or sourcing. So you’re saying that’s not what they said to you?
MACCOTTER: I’m not sure what our letter said, to be honest, but we have now revealed the methodology. And again, if they wanted to cooperate, they have our number and who to contact. They know how to get in contact with all of us. There’s really just no motivation on their part.
JOURNALIST 1: Yeah. And then the second question is just, you know, obviously in Nevada, DHS provided the list of 16,000 voters. It turned out none of them were non-citizen, very legal voters. And then even in States where the State Government has been a little bit more cooperative, are eagerly cooperative with kind of reviewing voter rolls. They’ve struggled to kind of accurately identify and cross-reference those lists. How confident are you in your methodology? I mean, you’re still using language like we believe or most likely. So can you talk a little bit about what separates this methodology from other places in the Country?
TRENT MACCOTTER: So the Nevada story, this is a false storyline. By the way, this notion that we gave them a bunch of names, it turned out all the names were false. We provided them, DHS I believe, provided them with an initial list of suspected aliens that included low confidence, medium confidence, and high confidence. We asked the State, what do you want? Do you want the high confidence only? Do you want all of them? Do you want ones that we’ve been able to manually verify as of that moment? And the State wrote back, is my understanding, and said “Just give us the high confidence ones that you manually identify and affirm right now” which was a small number because it was early on in the process. So the idea that we went from like 15,000 in Nevada down to zero or 100 or something is just a false narrative. I want to correct that, so I appreciate you asking that question. Again, here, like we have the methodology laid out. We want California to work with us. There may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect, and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us. We can knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California were to work with us. We have extensive databases we can use. These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are non-citizens. And so to answer our question, I imagine, you know, if you haven’t asked it, probably someone else will. Originally, there was a letter from DHS that said 190,000, and then we have 20,000 here. Think of it like 190,000 is the ceiling, 20,000 is the floor. 20,000 are the ones we’re the most confident about, the ones where we sent the list to the State, sent the list to the County. 190,000 includes medium confidence, lower confidence, kind of the initial cut. They have not been manually verified yet, that sort of thing. And so there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence. When we sent this list of 20,000, those are the ones where we feel the most confident, and we want the state to work with us on those.
BILL ESSAYLI: I want to talk about California, because as a former legislator, I understand the system here pretty well. I want to be clear, California does nothing to confirm the citizenship status of a registered voter, nothing. California has no idea who’s a citizen and who’s not. The only thing California relies on is an attestation. When you register to vote, you sign, you swear that you’re a citizen. In the eyes of California, that’s enough proof for them you are now a citizen in their eyes. Attestation is not verification. So when we submit a list to California, and we say we want to work with you to confirm it, we want to run their voter rolls through our federal immigration databases. California is refusing to do that. They’re refusing to work with us to give us their voter rolls, which has all the identifying information so we can have positive matches on all these. They’re refusing to do that. When California says that we didn’t respond to methodology, they’re lying. We explain the process. They want to look inside our systems. They want to look at our work product. They want to challenge it before having to show any of their work product. So it’s a two-way road. We’re happy to show a lot of our work, most of our work, but California’s kind of the table, and they have to be willing to open their books as well. And you guys should be asking “Why is California refusing to show their voter rolls? What are they afraid of? What are they hiding?” California knows, like that audit, they have non-citizens that are getting ballots as we speak, and they know that. And their line keeps shifting. It’s “Well, we don’t trust the Government” or “It’s not that many people, it’s not a big deal.” Well, I thought every vote mattered. All of a sudden, it doesn’t. So all these narratives are false. They’ve never disproven a single one of our records, because they have no proof of citizenship. Nevada and California have no proof of citizenship. Ask them how they know they’re citizens. They will not be able to answer that question. So I just want to clarify for California, because there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation being spread by the deceivers up there in Sacramento, the Governor and the Secretary of State and the Attorney General. They’re lying.
JOURNALIST 2: I have a, I got a question from online. It says “Can you please address the issue of the 20,000 likely non-citizen registrants? How is it even possible to stop them from voting or setting their votes aside?”
MACCOTTER: Well, so these are mail ballots, of course, because California mails ballots to everybody. And so when the ballots come back in, they could be segregated. This is a pretty common election feature, actually happens all the time. Provisional ballots, absentee ballots, maybe someone with a ballot that gets destroyed in the process of voting. It will get segregated until you can confirm whether the person was allowed to vote or has already voted. It’s a pretty standard tailored response to what in our view is a pretty egregious set of circumstances here by the State of California and LA County.
JOURNALIST 3: Trent, you talked about California’s voter rolls being public. This isn’t a new thing that they’re public. Why are you doing this now when people have already been voting in California for over two weeks? The election ends, the last day of voting is in two weeks. Why now? Why not have taken this action months ago?
TRENT MACCOTTER: Well, the State of California has brought us to this point, unfortunately. We sent them letters, as I said, we’ve sent them numerous letters over the Summer, over the Fall. We’ve given them information. We’ve asked for them to reach out. I’ve said they’ve got my number. If they want to call me, we can talk. And we hit the point now where they actually start sending out the ballots. They haven’t done anything. So at this point, it’s an emergency of their own creation. As Bill said, the State of California knows they have thousands of people on their rolls who are not allowed to vote. They now know the identity of many of those people and they still just say “Never mind, we’re not going to pay any attention to it.”
JOURNALIST 3: And Bill, you had said that many of the 28 had actually voted in elections. Do we know how many of the 28?
ESSAYLI: Yeah, we can get you this chart. We can get you this chart after here, but on there, it breaks down when they registered to vote and which elections they voted in. Again, I think the majority did cast a vote in a prior election. Not all, but most did. But again, even if you are not intending to vote, you’re still getting a live ballot from the State of California. As Trent said, California mails every single person a ballot. So it’s a big concern to have ballots floating around and who knows who’s filling them out and returning them, even if they don’t plan on it. But is it breaking the law if you don’t vote? It is against the law to be registered to vote as a non-citizen in a federal election. It is against the law.
JOURNALIST 3: Do you think there’s any of these cases where these folks that you took into custody didn’t know that they were actually registered to vote?
BILL ESSAYLI: I can speak for the cases in my district. No, because they had an opportunity to to correct that false information and they also swore in immigration documents that they weren’t registered to vote. You have to go out of your way to register to vote. It’s not something that just happens to you. So they either attested to it when they got a driver’s license or they went out of their way to file a voter registration form and they swore under oath that they were a citizen.
JOURNALIST 2: What are the penalties that this group is facing?
BILL ESSAYLI: It varies on the charges. So a lot of these, some of them are charged with immigration offenses for lying to immigration agents about being registered to vote and those are felonies and I’ll have to get you the staff maxes. But there’s a combination of offenses of felonies and misdemeanors that are charged throughout the 28 cases. Five years for the felony.
TRENT MACCOTTER: On the prior question of maybe somehow was this an accident? I mean the allegations are obviously no. My understanding is I think all of these are green card holders, almost all of them. When you get your green card it says by the way here are the things you are absolutely positively not allowed to do: Serve on a jury for example and go vote or register in a federal election. There’s no mistake.
JOURNALIST 2: Got another question online if you will. Says what information was included in the thumb drive that the DOJ sent to L.A. County? Is there other identifying information besides names? If the lawsuit is successful how will California be able to identify which ballots correspond to people on the list?
BILL ESSAYLI: We gave them the names, the addresses, and the birthdays and that’s more than enough information for California to identify them. And like the Deputy Attorney General said sequestering ballots is not a new thing. They do it when signatures don’t match. California has the signature verification program. If they don’t think a signature matches they sequester it. They put it to the side until they can validate whether that was the voter. They can validate the voter’s identity. We’re not asking them to do anything that they don’t normally do. They just don’t want to do it. That’s the difference. I think a question yes ma’am.
JOURNALIST 4: Yeah the National Voter Registration Act prohibited systemic maintenance of voter lists within 90 days of an election although I know there’s a larger question a legal question in the Court on whether that applies to non-citizens. Do you worry at all about disenfranchising voters or distracting election officials when they need to focus on the election?
TRENT MACCOTTER: Well when you say focus on the election you mean focus on ensuring that the people who are allowed to vote actually do vote. As I said earlier ensuring that federal law is followed does not undermine elections. It strengthens the integrity of those elections. These election officials, this is exactly what they should be focusing on. And again if they would work with us we’re happy to ensure that every citizen’s vote gets counted positively and we’re happy to ensure that every non-citizen’s vote does not get counted and that they get charged. That’s what they should be focusing on.
BILL ESSAYLI: We’re not asking them to remove anyone from the voter rolls. We’re just asking them to put the ballots to the side. So David this is the NVRA thing is a total red herring. We’re not asking them to remove anybody.
JOURNALIST 5: Question for U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli on the North Long Beach immigration operation over the weekend. Can you share anything about what led up to that and why this person was detained?
BILL ESSAYLI: I don’t have any information because I don’t believe it was a criminal operation. I think that was DHS conducting their immigration enforcement. There may be charges coming out of that. I’m not sure. It has not been presented to my office yet. I did see some of the video. I have to say I’m really disappointed that there are members of Congress encouraging people to confront our men and women in uniform out on the streets and that’s irresponsible. They are causing really dangerous situations for both the community and the agents. The agents are following the law. They’re doing their job. They’re enforcing immigration laws passed by Congress. If the congressman doesn’t like it, he should change the laws. Not encourage people to violently resist ICE.
JOURNALIST 5: Were you guys able to verify if he is or is not a U.S. citizen?
ESSAYLI: I don’t know. You’ll have to ask DHS because it was not a criminal operation.
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