DOJ charges dozens of people as it rushes to bring prosecutions before November
By Sadie Gurman
Gabriel Covarrubias was driving to work from his home in the Atlanta suburbs when a state trooper pulled him over, citing his too-dark window tint.
The real concern: He was suspected of lying on a passport application and illegally voting.
Covarrubias, 44 years old, moved to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 14 and created a home-remodeling business after buying a false identity. He voted in the 2024 presidential election. Federal agents involved in his arrest asked him who he voted for and why: President Trump, a fellow business owner, he said.
Covarrubias, who pleaded guilty last month to two offenses, now faces up to 10 years in prison and possible deportation.
He is one of more than 60 people charged in the past few months as part of a surge by the Justice Department to prosecute as many noncitizen voters as possible before November's midterm elections. The blitz reflects the priorities of Trump, who has alleged that U.S. elections are vulnerable to widespread fraud, especially illegal voting from people who aren't citizens.
"We are going to keep on investigating and spending the resources and time and effort on these cases because we think they do matter," Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a recent event announcing new prosecutions.
Election experts and defense lawyers say the department's own enforcement push confirms that the crime is confined to rare, isolated incidents that don't affect election outcomes.
"When the Department of Justice devotes enormous resources to identify and prosecute the miniscule number of noncitizens who seek to vote, we ought to ask why," said Ross Brockway, a public defender representing Covarrubias.
Brockway said his client was a job creator and father of two American citizen children who was being attacked for trying to participate in the democratic process. "We ask that he be treated as a neighbor, rather than branded as a criminal," he said.
There isn't a common link among the dozens of cases the Justice Department has touted, and court records don't show an organized effort to commit fraud. Defendants include registered Democrats, Republicans and people with no party affiliation. They range in age from early 20s to late 70s and hail from more than 25 different countries.
"I don't think we can say there's a pattern we've identified. Every one of these situations is different," Blanche said recently in announcing charges against 10 noncitizens in Minnesota.
The department has sought to publicize the cases for maximum effect. Blanche unveiled the Minnesota cases while surrounded by poster-sized photos of some of the arrestees being handcuffed. And in a batch of cases announced this week, the department published 11 photos of lawful permanent residents being apprehended.
Senior Justice Department officials have stepped up pressure on prosecutors in the field to charge as many election-crimes cases as they can, directing them to decline prosecutions rarely and only with approval from the U.S. attorney in their jurisdiction, people familiar with the process said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen. The prosecutions "deter others from breaking the law," she said. "We want any alien thinking about casting an illegal ballot in November to think twice."
With data from some state voter rolls and other sources, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security have been scrutinizing thousands of leads and sending hundreds of them to federal prosecutors to potentially charge, officials said.
DHS currently has more than 1,600 open investigations into voting by noncitizens, officials said.
Prosecutors in most cases have filed short indictments that offer few, if any, clues about what led people to cast their votes.
The Justice Department is generally bringing two types of cases: felony charges of making a false claim of U.S. citizenship to vote in an election, which requires it to show a person knew they were ineligible to vote and did so anyway; and alien voting, a misdemeanor that requires prosecutors only to prove that someone was a noncitizen and voted.
A federal judge in Miami this month struck down one such misdemeanor case as unconstitutional, saying Congress overstepped its authority by imposing a voter qualification on the states. The Justice Department has already appealed the ruling, which could jeopardize many of the cases.
Aside from questions of law, a jury "could look at some defendants quite sympathetically," said Georgetown law professor Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor. "That's not a defense, but the reality is some jurors won't want to convict because they feel sympathy to the defendant or they feel this is a waste of government resources."
Many of those charged are living in the U.S. legally with green cards. Khalwinder Singh Bhengura, 69, a grandfather from India who struggles with English, said he didn't understand he was registering to vote when he checked a box on his Texas driver's license application two years ago.
When Bhengura received his proof of voter registration in the mail shortly later, he assumed he could head down to the local library and cast his ballot in the 2024 election, his attorney said.
Some defendants told investigators they didn't know they couldn't vote. A 46-year-old Mexican woman living in the U.S. legally said in an interview with a federal agent that she didn't read the qualifications on the Texas voter-registration application that she needed to be a citizen, according to court documents.
Other suspects emerged while officers were investigating other crimes. A 31-year-old Honduran man landed on authorities' radar after he disrupted immigration officers during a February protest in Camarillo, Calif., a misdemeanor citation to which he pleaded guilty. Prosecutors said the man later sent threatening messages to a federal agent, including one that referenced the midterm elections. An investigator then searched databases and discovered the man was registered to vote but wasn't a citizen.