A Mexican national living in Midland has been charged with casting an illegal ballot in the 2024 federal election, another case in Texas’s widening noncitizen voting crackdown.
Texas Scorecard reported that Imelda Magallanes, 51, faces one federal count of voting by an alien in a federal election. She is a lawful permanent resident who has lived in Midland and remains a Mexican national, not a U.S. citizen.
Federal authorities in the Western District of Texas say Midland County Elections Office records show she registered to vote in October 2020 using a Texas driver’s license, then voted in the November 2024 General Election. If convicted, she faces up to one year in federal prison and a $100,000 fine. Illegal voting by a non-U.S. citizen is also a deportable offense.
Magallanes received lawful permanent resident status in December 2010 and renewed her card in 2023. Permanent residency is not citizenship. Federal law still bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
County records place her on the rolls four years before the contested vote. She used a state driver’s license as identification at registration, a path that did not stop a noncitizen from getting on the voter list.
That pattern is not limited to Midland. A green card holder arrested in El Paso faced similar allegations in an earlier cycle, underscoring how long these cases have followed the same basic failure: noncitizens ending up on the rolls and casting ballots.
Prosecutors have not publicly detailed how investigators tied Magallanes’s ballot to the Midland file, and the charge date is not in the available record. What is clear is the allegation itself: a noncitizen voted in a federal contest reserved for citizens.
In May, Samuel James Hall, a 50-year-old British citizen living legally in Houston, admitted to illegally voting in the 2024 federal election. In August, Ada Ngozi Otuka, a 63-year-old U.K. citizen living in Katy, pleaded guilty to illegally voting in the 2020 election and falsely claiming U.S. citizenship on state voter registration forms.
Federal prosecutors said Otuka cast ballots in 2012, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024. That is five elections spanning more than a decade before a guilty plea closed the file.
Those outcomes match the broader enforcement push seen when the FBI charged five people for illegal voting and critics treated the count as a punchline instead of a warning. Texas cases keep producing names, pleas, and charging documents.
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors also moved on seven foreign nationals in North Texas on charges of unlawfully voting in federal elections and, in some files, falsely claiming U.S. citizenship. One was described as an illegal immigrant from Mexico. The other six were lawful permanent residents from Mexico, Nigeria, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Five of those defendants were charged with illegally voting in the 2024 General Election. A sixth was charged with making false statements on a naturalization application after voting in the 2018 federal election. One of the 2024 ballots was tied to Dallas County.
"Federal elections belong to American citizens, period."
U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould put the rule in plain language in connection with the North Texas sweep.
Texas has not treated these files as one-off mistakes. On September 15, Secretary of State Robert Howden referred another 117 cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General’s office.
The secretary of state’s office began a statewide citizenship review last year and ran more than 18 million registered voters through the federal SAVE system. That initial pass flagged 2,724 registered voters as potential noncitizens and sent those registrations to county election officials for review.
How many of those 2,724 names have been charged, cleared, or removed is not spelled out in the public summary. The referral of 117 cases shows the state is still moving files to prosecutors rather than shelving them.
Readers tracking the same enforcement theme will recognize the pattern from a Honduran national’s arrest in the DOJ crackdown on noncitizen registration, federal and state tools aimed at the same problem from different directions.
On September 25, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s order that had blocked a modified SAVE program. The stay lets the Trump administration resume an expanded voter citizenship verification effort that allows states to use Social Security records to check citizenship.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. The League of Women Voters had opposed the election integrity measure.
DHS General Counsel James Percival addressed the fight over data access on X after the emergency filing.
"Yes, you read that right."
Percival added that officials “had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a win for election integrity and said the state must keep using tools that protect fair elections and the voice of the American people.
Separate from SAVE, Director of Elections Christina Adkins told counties in a September 22 message that the secretary of state’s office had worked with the Texas Department of Public Safety to fix a problem with incomplete registration records from DPS online transactions. Those files had not been transmitted to counties for review. The backlog was forwarded for processing as the October 5 registration deadline approached for the November 3, 2026 General Election.
Magallanes’s case sits inside that larger record: a Midland noncitizen on the rolls since 2020, a 2024 federal ballot, a Western District charge, and a penalty range that includes prison, a heavy fine, and deportation exposure.
It also sits beside Hall’s admission, Otuka’s multi-election guilty plea, the seven North Texas defendants, 117 state referrals, and a Supreme Court stay that restored citizenship-check tools opponents tried to block. A Bahamian national arrested after an alleged illegal 2020 vote is another file in the same category readers keep seeing when prosecutors finally pull the thread.
Texas election fights are not only about noncitizen ballots. Residency shortcuts draw scrutiny too, including coverage of a Texas Democrat dodging residency questions after reports of multiple votes tied to a parents’ address. Different statute, same demand: the roll has to mean what the law says it means.
Federal elections are closed to noncitizens for a reason. Midland’s newest charge is what enforcement looks like when officials treat that rule as real.