The Trump administration has threatened criminal prosecution against California election workers who knowingly count ballots from noncitizens, escalating a fight over voter rolls one day after suing the state.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent a letter Friday to Los Angeles officials warning that election workers who knowingly tabulate ballots from people identified by federal agencies as noncitizens risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime. The warning landed one day after the Department of Justice sued California over claims the state has refused to purge noncitizens from its voter rolls, ABC News reported.
McCotter made the stakes plain in the letter. Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime, and knowingly facilitating that conduct is equally unlawful.
"The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant,"
McCotter wrote. He added that workers who knowingly tabulate those ballots "risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime."
President Donald Trump amplified the letter on his social media platform and followed up with a direct message of his own.
"They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!"
Trump posted while resharing the warning, underscoring the administration's intent to treat knowing facilitation of illegal votes as a prosecutable offense rather than a paperwork dispute. That enforcement posture fits a broader pattern of the president pressing accountability through the justice system, including past signals he still could pursue high-profile figures when the facts warrant it.
Earlier this week McCotter had already pressed California officials harder. Letters to the Los Angeles County Clerk and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber demanded access to a password-protected thumb drive that DOJ officials said contained thousands of names of potential noncitizens believed to be on the state's voter registration list.
Officials were given a two-day deadline to confirm they were reviewing the list and moving to segregate any potential ballots returned from people whose names appeared on that drive. California voting officials called the request legally baseless and framed it as a last-ditch effort to intervene in the state's election process.
Weber answered the broader federal pressure with a sharp public statement.
"The USDOJ's relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states' protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,"
the California secretary of state said. Her office cast federal efforts to clean the rolls as the problem rather than the presence of potential noncitizens on those rolls.
The Justice Department has not treated noncitizen voting as a theoretical issue. In recent weeks the department has promoted dozens of arrests of alleged noncitizens who voted in past cycles. That track record of cases sits alongside the California lawsuit and the fresh threat letter to Los Angeles officials.
Similar DOJ civil actions under the Trump administration have targeted other institutions over preferential treatment of illegal immigrants, including a suit against the University of Delaware for offering them cheaper tuition than out-of-state Americans, a case detailed in coverage of how the DOJ sues when state or campus rules tilt against lawful residents.
The Friday letter was not the first signal from the administration. Over the summer, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin warned that election officials can be held accountable by fines, penalties, and even prison time depending on how far the conduct goes. McCotter's language to Los Angeles officials put that warning into a concrete prosecutorial frame tied to specific ballot-handling decisions.
In late September, McCotter appeared at a Justice Department press conference in Washington alongside U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak for the District of Utah and announced that an election worker in Utah had been indicted for allegedly throwing away ballots. The California noncitizen-voting dispute and the Utah case are separate, yet both show the department treating election-worker misconduct as a criminal matter rather than an internal personnel issue.
Voting expert Sean Morales Doyle of the Brennan Center told reporters the administration appears to be laying groundwork to challenge results after Election Day. "They're putting a nail in the wall for something to hang their hat on later," he said. That reading treats preparation to enforce federal criminal law against knowing facilitation of noncitizen ballots as a pretextual attack on the process itself.
ABC News noted scant evidence that noncitizen voting is widespread and said documented examples fall far short of figures that would tilt outcomes. The same reporting said experts overwhelmingly agree the lawsuit against California is unlikely to succeed. Those assessments do not erase the federal statute making noncitizen voting in a federal election a crime, nor do they erase aider-and-abettor liability for officials who knowingly process such ballots after federal agencies flag the names.
The sequence matters. The Justice Department filed its suit against California over the alleged refusal to purge noncitizens from voter rolls. The next day McCotter's letter landed with Los Angeles officials spelling out criminal exposure for election workers who ignore federal identifications of noncitizens and still tabulate their ballots. The earlier thumb-drive letters had already sought a rapid review and segregation of suspect returned ballots.
California officials have answered with claims of unlawful federal overreach and warnings about public distrust. The administration has answered with statutes, a lawsuit, a list of names it says belong to potential noncitizens, and now an explicit reminder that knowingly facilitating a federal election crime carries real consequences. Trump's social media follow-up removed any ambiguity about the intended endpoint for people who cross that line.
How the department handles charging decisions and internal guidance remains a live issue across multiple fronts, including earlier questions about whether the DOJ will not reopen certain probes and separate guidance on political activity by senior appointees. In California the public posture has been straightforward: noncitizen voting is illegal, facilitating it knowingly is illegal, and election workers who proceed anyway should expect the law to follow.
Los Angeles County and state election offices now face a documented federal demand to examine a drive containing thousands of flagged names, a pending lawsuit over roll maintenance, and a letter that ties knowing tabulation of noncitizen ballots to aider-and-abettor exposure. Weber's office continues to describe federal data requests as chaos. McCotter's letter describes them as the enforcement of existing criminal law.
The administration has also secured Supreme Court permission to use a citizenship database ahead of the midterms, another tool aimed at the same integrity question. Together with the arrests already promoted, the California suit, the thumb-drive demand, and the prosecution warning, the Justice Department is building a paper trail that treats clean rolls and lawful ballots as non-negotiable.
Direction from the White House to the department on standing down or standing firm in other legal fights has been equally clear in recent months, including instructions to let a federal court ruling loosening firearms restrictions stand rather than prolong the dispute. The California election-worker letter fits the same pattern of using DOJ tools to draw hard lines where federal law already exists.
Election workers in California now have written notice from the acting deputy attorney general. Knowingly counting ballots cast by people federal agencies have identified as noncitizens is not a gray area under the letter's reading of federal criminal law. It is conduct that can turn a local official into an aider and abettor.
Lawful voters and taxpayers should not have to guess whether their ballots are weighed against votes cast by people who are not citizens. When a state resists basic roll maintenance and federal officials respond with statutes, lawsuits, and prosecution warnings, the choice is accountability or continued fog. The Trump Justice Department has chosen the first option.