Federal agents arrested a Bahamian green card holder with a lengthy violent criminal record in Georgia after investigators determined he voted illegally in the 2020 election, and the White House says deportation is coming.
Homeland Security Investigations agents out of the Atlanta field office took Anthony Tyrone Higgs into custody on Sept. 3 in Decatur, Georgia, Fox News Digital reported. Higgs, a lawful permanent resident admitted to the United States in October 1976, now faces proceedings to revoke his immigration status and remove him from the country. He is currently held by ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations division.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin laid out the case in blunt terms:
"This criminal alien from the Bahamas has a rap sheet for multiple violent crimes, including armed robbery, domestic violence, and assault on a police officer. On top of all of that, he illegally voted in the 2020 election."
Higgs' criminal history goes well beyond those offenses. Officials say his record also includes resisting arrest, two counts of grand larceny, and two counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime. The Trump administration's DHS has placed him in proceedings to strip his green card, a step that, if completed, would end nearly five decades of legal residency.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital that Higgs forfeited his right to remain in the country through his own conduct:
"This alien was a guest in our country who forfeited his right to be in the U.S. when he committed these violent crimes and voted in the 2020 election."
Bis went further, framing the arrest as part of a broader enforcement posture. "Any noncitizens who vote illegally in our elections will be arrested and removed," she said. "American elections are only for Americans."
The case fits a pattern the administration has been building for months. DHS has identified hundreds of thousands of noncitizens it says appear on voter rolls in key states, and enforcement actions have followed in multiple jurisdictions.
DHS pointed to a string of recent noncitizen voting prosecutions and arrests beyond the Higgs case. Carlos Jaramillo-Grajales, a Colombian illegal immigrant, was sentenced to three years in federal prison in August after pleading guilty to identity theft he allegedly used to vote illegally for more than two decades. That case was prosecuted out of the Middle District of Florida.
U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe, who handled the Jaramillo-Grajales prosecution, made clear the office intends to keep pressing. "Federal immigration laws serve to safeguard our nation's borders and protect the integrity of our government," Kehoe said. "Those who seek to circumvent, exploit, or break these laws will be prosecuted fully."
The Jaramillo-Grajales sentencing was one of several cases that have drawn attention to election integrity enforcement. A Colombian national's conviction for voter fraud and identity theft underscored just how long some of these schemes can run before anyone catches them, more than twenty years, in that instance.
In Philadelphia, ICE and the FBI partnered to arrest Mahady Sacko, a Mauritanian national charged with voter fraud. Sacko had allegedly voted illegally multiple times going back to 2008. An immigration board upheld his removal order as far back as 2002, yet he remained in the country for years afterward, voting in American elections while living under an order that said he should not be here at all.
That gap, a 2002 removal order and illegal votes cast as late as 2008 or beyond, captures a systemic failure that no amount of bureaucratic explanation can excuse. A man the government had already ordered removed stayed long enough to cast ballots in multiple elections.
HSI also flagged two additional cases involving unnamed noncitizens. A Slovakian national was found to have voted illegally in New Jersey during the 2022 midterm elections. An Australian national stands accused of casting illegal ballots in Louisiana in both 2022 and 2024.
Taken together, the cases span at least five states, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Louisiana, and involve nationals from the Bahamas, Colombia, Mauritania, Slovakia, and Australia. The geographic and national diversity of the offenders suggests the problem is not confined to a single border or a single community. It is a structural weakness in voter verification systems that has gone unaddressed for years.
The administration has pushed for stronger tools to catch noncitizen registrations before they result in cast ballots. The Trump DOJ has asked the Supreme Court to restore a voter verification tool that a federal judge blocked, arguing election officials need access to federal citizenship data to keep rolls clean.
Mullin closed his statement on the Higgs case with a direct promise. "Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of ICE, this criminal will be removed from our country and can never interfere in our elections again," he said.
Still, the Higgs case raises questions the available reporting does not answer. How did investigators detect that Higgs voted illegally in the 2020 election? What mechanism flagged a green card holder who had lived in the country since 1976? And has Higgs been charged with a specific criminal offense related to the illegal vote, or is the government pursuing this solely as an immigration action?
Those details matter. If the detection came through a systematic audit, it would suggest the administration's verification push is producing results. If it surfaced incidentally during a criminal investigation into Higgs' violent offenses, the discovery may say more about luck than about any durable fix to the system.
Meanwhile, the broader crackdown continues to expand. A Honduran national's arrest on voter fraud charges marked the first case in the DOJ's focused effort to prosecute noncitizen registration. And the FBI has brought its own charges in separate cases, though critics have mocked the small numbers rather than grapple with the principle at stake.
Every illegal vote cast by a noncitizen cancels out the lawful vote of an American citizen. Whether the final count of offenders is five or five thousand, the principle does not change, and the people whose votes get diluted deserve a government willing to enforce the law.