Justice Department Indicts 10 Green Card Holders in Minnesota for Illegal Voting

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that a federal grand jury in Minnesota has indicted 10 foreign nationals on charges of voting illegally, the latest in a string of election-related prosecutions as the midterm campaign enters its final weeks.

The grand jury returned the indictments on Sept. 24. All 10 defendants are lawful permanent residents, commonly called green card holders, and come from countries including Liberia, Lithuania, Ghana, Germany, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada and South Africa. Prosecutors say they voted in the November 2022 and 2024 general elections and in Minnesota's August 2026 primary. One defendant, a Ghanaian national, is accused of voting in this year's primary, while a Lithuanian woman faces charges tied to the 2022 general election.

The indictments include nine counts of voting as a noncitizen and nine counts of falsely claiming U.S. citizenship in order to register or vote. A false claim of citizenship carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Voting by a noncitizen is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced the charges, and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Teirab is prosecuting the cases. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the administration plans to keep going. "That should not be a partisan concept," he said of enforcing voting eligibility rules. Blanche said the Trump administration has brought more than 90 voter-fraud cases in its second term, 50 of them in the last five weeks.

Critics say the numbers show how rare the problem is. Democracy Now calculated that the 10 defendants represent about 0.00012 percent of the roughly 8.5 million ballots Minnesotans cast across the three elections. Election officials in both parties have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extremely uncommon, and Minnesota's election system includes checks on registration.

The announcement came the same day Blanche filed a judicial misconduct complaint against nearly every federal judge in Minnesota who criticized the administration's immigration surge, known as Operation Metro Surge. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz has described the events of that operation as "pretty much unprecedented" and a "grave threat to the rule of law." Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called the complaint "a desperate and dangerous attack on American judicial independence."

President Donald Trump has made noncitizen voting a theme of his midterm message, and the administration has revived a federal citizenship database to check voter rolls. The Department of Homeland Security has said hundreds of thousands of noncitizens appear on state rolls, though its own letters to states have cited lower figures.

Arraignment dates for the 10 defendants have not been announced. Convictions on the citizenship charges could also trigger deportation proceedings, since a false claim of citizenship is a deportable offense for permanent residents.