DHS Says 151 Voter Fraud Arrests Made as Whistleblower Alleges Agents Broke State Law Pulling Voter Data

Since the Justice Department's first wave of September arrests, federal prosecutors have charged or arrested at least 22 people in voter fraud cases this month alone, according to the Daily Signal. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem now says the broader effort has produced 151 arrests, with 1,620 cases of noncitizen voting under active investigation and as many as 300,000 additional registrations being screened, Noem told Fox News, as reported by Breitbart.

"We're scrubbing them. We're comparing them to those that are in the country illegally, those that are legal permanent residents and those that are citizens," Noem said.

The state-by-state breakdown, per the Daily Signal, shows Texas with more arrests than any other state this month, followed by cases in Georgia and Michigan, both hosting competitive Senate races, plus Wisconsin, Idaho, Massachusetts and New Jersey. The week before, prosecutors charged six people in California, Kansas and Louisiana. Earlier in the month, arrests came in Pennsylvania.

The Justice Department's own release says it filed charges against 16 individuals nationwide for illegal voting, fraudulent registration and related schemes. That release also folds in unrelated cases, including a six-year prison sentence for a Miami Beach identity-theft organizer, Dmitry Shushlebin, and an alleged Skid Row scheme in Los Angeles paying people to sign petitions using stolen identities. These cases involve fraud but not unlawful voting itself.

The specific voting cases are narrower. NBC News reported that federal prosecutors this month charged Katya Rodriguez, 30, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, along with two others, and released video of her arrest. A federal grand jury indicted Thomas Holtzman, 68, a U.S. citizen, and his wife Marisol Guzman, 50, alleging Guzman illegally voted in 2024 and Holtzman aided her. In New Jersey, Mercedes Alexandra Cardoso, a lawful permanent resident from Ecuador, is accused of voting in the June 2024 primary. In Wisconsin, Jesus Javier Jurado Garcia, 25, of Mexico, is accused of voting as a noncitizen in 2022.

"Election fraud is a serious crime, and it is the duty of the Department of Justice to treat it as such," Attorney General Pam Bondi said. FBI Director Kash Patel said election integrity is "one of the top priorities for this FBI."

Republicans are using the arrests to press for the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote in federal elections and remains stalled in the Senate. Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., chair of the House Election Integrity Caucus, called the arrests "encouraging." Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., cited a Pew Research Center survey finding 83% of Americans support photo ID requirements. Both told the Daily Signal the bill's holdout blocks the will of most voters.

The whistleblower complaint

A federal whistleblower, represented by the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund, has raised a separate set of concerns about how DHS is compiling its numbers. The whistleblower's account, delivered to Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and made public with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, alleges that agents working DHS's "Unlawful Voter Initiative" plugged personal information into state voter-lookup websites while posing as the voter or someone acting with the voter's authorization, according to NPR.

Virginia is one state whose voter-lookup system requires such an attestation. The report claims this "potentially already committed thousands of violations of state law." A DHS spokesperson told NPR: "The Department accessed publicly available data from states' voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems. It's an easy step to secure our elections."

The whistleblower also produced training materials showing agents were given quotas of five records reviewed per hour, 40 per day, leaving roughly 12 minutes to determine whether a person was a lawful voter. NPR reported the initiative and the legal questions around it were first reported by the New York Times.

A fair reading of the conservative position is straightforward: DOJ has secured real indictments with named defendants, some already convicted, and independent survey data shows overwhelming public support for tighter ID rules. A fair reading of the counter-concern is also straightforward: the same DHS effort that produced those cases is running on inconsistent data and tight quotas. DHS has already acknowledged that some of the earlier noncitizen voter-roll figures it publicized, including the 250,000-registration claim across California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada touted in July, were inflated, per NPR.

Noem's 151 confirmed arrests, against a screening pool of up to 300,000 records, is a small fraction so far. NBC News noted that despite a large multi-state records push in Trump's second term, the administration has struggled in both terms to produce evidence of fraud at a scale that would change election outcomes.

No inspector general or state attorney general investigation into the whistleblower's allegations has been announced. Whether Virginia or another state pursues a legal challenge over the attestation issue, and whether the Senate revisits the SAVE America Act before the midterms, remain open questions.