Justice Department Charges Five in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin With Illegal Voting or False Registration
The department says four of the five defendants are noncitizens and one is a U.S. citizen accused of helping his wife register; the charges cover the 2022 and 2024 elections and were announced two months before the November 2026 midterms.
Five Charges, One Number That Cuts Two Ways
On Friday, September 4, 2026, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against five people in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin. The department says four of them are noncitizens who registered or voted in the 2022 or 2024 elections[1]. The fifth, Thomas Holtzman, 68, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is a U.S. citizen accused of making a false statement of citizenship and helping his wife do the same[1].
All five have only been charged. Under the department's own standard notice, a charge is an allegation, and every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt[1]. Holtzman faces up to 10 years. His wife, Marisol Guzman, and New Jersey's Mercedes Alexandra Cardoso each face up to one year. Katya Rodriguez of Harrisburg faces up to 11, and Wisconsin's Jesus Javier Jurado Garcia rounds out the group[1].
Here is the number both sides agree on, and where they split. Five people were charged after roughly 18 months of federal subpoenas for state voter files and a new multi-agency search[3][14]. Attorney General Todd Blanche called the integrity of elections "of utmost importance to every American," and FBI Director Kash Patel said the defendants "stole votes from American citizens" by breaking the law[1]. Critics don't dispute that five people were charged. They dispute what five proves.
What 18 Months of Searching Actually Turned Up
To the administration, the count of prosecutions measures effort, not the size of the problem[1]. Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon's office has argued the department "stands ready to enforce the laws Congress enacted to ensure only American citizens vote in federal elections"[16]. A law nobody enforces isn't really a law, in this view — so five real cases, brought carefully, count as success on their own terms.
There's also a detection argument underneath the enforcement one. Most states have no direct way to check a registration form against citizenship records. That means a low prosecution count could reflect weak detection rather than a small problem. Building a federal system that cross-checks immigration records against voter rolls is, in this telling, how you'd actually find out[7].
To critics, the yield is the whole story. Set five charges against the roughly 155 million ballots cast in a presidential year, and the rate is close to zero. A 2017 Brennan Center study found just 30 suspected noncitizen-voting incidents across 23.5 million votes in 42 jurisdictions — about 0.0001%[10]. Democratic officials and voting-rights groups argue that an 18-month, nine-agency hunt producing five cases is itself the finding[3][14].
State audits give both camps real numbers to point to, and both numbers are true. Georgia's October 2024 review of about 8.2 million registrations found 20 noncitizens on the rolls, 9 of whom had voted[11]. Ohio's 2024 audit, over a similarly sized roll, flagged 597 noncitizen registrants and 138 apparent voters[12]. Neither side is lying about its figure. They're answering different questions with the same data.
The 250,000 Number Behind the Headlines
A bigger, more contested number sits behind these five cases. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said roughly 250,000 noncitizens are registered across four states: Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania[9]. That figure comes from matching commercial or immigration data against voter files — a preliminary process, not a verified count.
PolitiFact examined the claim and found it works out to about 0.6% of the nearly 40 million registrations in those four states[8]. More importantly, fact-checkers noted that this kind of preliminary match has historically shrunk sharply once each individual case gets checked by hand[8]. That's because federal immigration databases record that someone was once a noncitizen — not reliably whether they later naturalized.
This is the mechanical crux of the whole dispute. A naturalized citizen still shows up in a database as having once held noncitizen status, because that status was real at some point in the past. A raw "match" against that database can't tell the difference between someone who is still not a citizen and someone who became one years ago. That's why Pennsylvania's own Republican Secretary of State, Al Schmidt, has said the state's rolls are "properly maintained and updated," even as his own state is one of the four DHS named[8].
The stakes of that technical gap are not abstract. DOJ has warned state election officials they could personally face criminal penalties if noncitizens end up voting[16]. For a county registrar, that shifts the incentive: aggressively purging a name that might be a false match costs the official nothing, while missing a real violation might. The pressure runs toward over-purging, regardless of which side turns out to be right about the scale of the problem.
A Nine-State Surge, Timed to the Calendar
The five charges didn't arrive alone. Days earlier, the Department of Homeland Security began what CNN reported as a nine-state "surge" of voter-fraud investigations, running from early September to mid-October — a window covering Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut[7]. The work is being run by Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE that normally handles smuggling and trafficking cases, not election law[7].
DOJ also released video of Homeland Security Investigations agents arresting a defendant at a Harrisburg apartment[3]. Releasing arrest footage before any trial is itself a choice, and it shapes how the public receives a case that hasn't yet been tested in court.
The timing lands about two months before the November 2026 midterms, in states with competitive races[1][8]. None of the five charging documents claims that any 2022 or 2024 election outcome was actually changed by the votes at issue[1][2]. That's a fact both sides accept — it's what they draw from it that differs.
Two States, Two Very Different Headlines
Coverage of the same five charges split hard along outlet lines. Right-leaning sites emphasized immigration status and swing-state geography. The Gateway Pundit's headline capitalized "FIVE" and singled out "Two Illegal Aliens from Mexico in Key Swing States," a framing that implies an effect on outcomes that no charging document actually alleges[5]. The Washington Examiner's headline called the defendants "illegal voters" outright, stating an accusation as settled fact[4].
Left-leaning coverage led with scale and motive instead. MSNBC's headline said the DHS hunt was "only finding a handful of possible noncitizen cases," putting the verdict on the program's legitimacy directly in the headline[14]. NBC News described the administration rolling the charges "out... ahead of midterms," a phrase that frames a legal filing like a product launch and supplies motive before describing the underlying facts[3]. The Associated Press wire story, syndicated widely, framed the charges as part of setting up "potential result challenges" after the election — treating the prosecutions as raw material for a future legitimacy fight rather than as a law enforcement story on its own[17].
Votebeat's coverage stood out as comparatively plain, leaning on audits and administrator quotes to ask whether noncitizen voting is common, rather than whether these five people did what they're accused of[2]. No outlet across the spectrum disputed the basic facts: five people charged, four described as noncitizens, one as a citizen accused of helping his wife.
What a Trial Can Settle, and What It Can't
Each of these five cases will eventually go before a jury applying a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. The relevant statutes generally require prosecutors to show the person knew a citizenship statement was false — not just that a box was checked incorrectly on a form. That distinction matters, because voter registration at motor-vehicle offices is often presented as a routine checkbox, and defendants may argue they didn't understand what they were signing.
A courtroom, though, can only resolve what happened to these five people. It can't settle the argument over what a small number of cases proves about a much bigger question. Meanwhile the broader machinery keeps moving regardless of any verdict: DHS agents are working cases in nine states through mid-October, states are under federal deadlines to hand over voter data, and ballots for the November midterms are already going out[7].
That last fact is the one with the largest practical reach. A single prosecution affects one person. A purge built on a preliminary data match can touch thousands, and the people most likely to be caught by it are naturalized citizens who are fully eligible to vote. Whether the coming weeks produce more clear-cut cases like these five, or a wave of wrongly flagged citizens, isn't yet something either side's numbers can answer.
Summary
On Friday, Sept. 4, 2026, the Justice Department announced charges against five people in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin. The department says four of them are not U.S. citizens and are accused of registering or voting in the 2022 or 2024 elections. The fifth, Thomas Holtzman, 68, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is a U.S. citizen. He is charged with making and helping his wife make a false statement of citizenship, and with a false voter registration[1]. All five are charged, not convicted. Under DOJ's own standard notice, a charge is an allegation and every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty[1].
The announcement lands two months before the November 2026 midterm elections. It is part of a broader federal push. Days earlier, the Department of Homeland Security began what CNN reported as a nine-state "surge" of voter-fraud investigations, running from early September to mid-October, in Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut[7]. DOJ also released video of Homeland Security Investigations agents arresting a defendant at a Harrisburg apartment[3].
The genuine dispute is not whether these five people were charged. It is what the five cases prove. The administration says federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and that enforcing it requires bringing individual cases — the number of prosecutions measures effort, not the size of the problem[1]. Critics say the yield is the point: after roughly 18 months of subpoenas for state voter files and a multi-agency hunt, the government has produced a handful of cases[3][14]. They point to state audits. Georgia's October 2024 review of about 8.2 million registrations found 20 noncitizens on the rolls, 9 of whom had voted[11]. Ohio's 2024 review, over a similar-sized roll, flagged 597 noncitizen registrants and 138 who appeared to have cast a ballot[12].
A second contested claim sits behind the prosecutions. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said roughly 250,000 noncitizens are registered in four states — Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania[9]. PolitiFact found the figure is a preliminary match count, of a kind that historically shrinks sharply once checked, and that it equals about 0.6% of the nearly 40 million registrations in those four states[8]. Pennsylvania's Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said his state's rolls are "properly maintained and updated"[8].
The Event
On Friday, Sept. 4, 2026, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against five people in three states for alleged illegal voting or fraudulent voter registration in the 2022 or 2024 elections[1]. In Pennsylvania, a federal grand jury indicted Thomas Holtzman, 68, and Marisol Guzman, 50, of Carlisle, and prosecutors charged Katya Rodriguez, 30, of Harrisburg; in Wisconsin, Jesus Javier Jurado Garcia, 25, of Beloit, was charged on Sept. 2; in New Jersey, Mercedes Alexandra Cardoso of Union County was charged with voting by an alien in a federal election[1][2]. The department says all except Holtzman are noncitizens[1]. DOJ also released footage of Homeland Security Investigations agents making an arrest at a Harrisburg apartment[3].
Undisputed Facts
- The Justice Department announced the five cases on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026, roughly two months before the November 2026 midterm elections[1][3].
- Federal law already makes it a crime for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election, and for anyone to falsely claim U.S. citizenship in order to register or vote[1].
- The stated maximum penalties are 10 years for Holtzman, 11 years for Rodriguez, and one year each for Guzman and Cardoso[1].
- All five defendants have been charged, not convicted, and DOJ states that a charge is an allegation and defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt[1].
- None of the five charging documents alleges that any election result was changed by the votes at issue[1][2].
- DHS began a coordinated voter-fraud investigative push in nine states in early September 2026, run by Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that normally handles smuggling and trafficking cases[7].
- Georgia's October 2024 audit of about 8.2 million registrations identified 20 noncitizens on the rolls, 9 of whom had voted[11].
- Ohio's 2024 citizenship review identified 597 noncitizen registrants, of whom 138 appeared to have cast ballots, out of roughly 8.2 million registered voters[12].
- DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin's claim that about 250,000 noncitizens are registered in Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania equals roughly 0.6% of the nearly 40 million registrations in those states, and PolitiFact reported it is a preliminary figure of a type that shrinks after vetting[8][9].
The Pressure
Strip away the moralizing and blame. What structural realities persist regardless of which narrative wins?
- Proof, not prevalence
- For the administration, the value of these cases is evidentiary, not statistical. A years-old claim that noncitizens vote becomes a documented fact the moment a grand jury indicts. That works whether the count is five or five hundred, which is why the release leads with charges and maximum sentences and never with rates[1].
- The denominator is the whole argument
- For critics, the only number that settles anything is cases divided by ballots. Five charges against roughly 155 million presidential-year ballots is a rate near zero, and the Brennan Center's 2017 review found 30 suspected incidents in 23.5 million votes[10]. Neither side is lying about its number; they are answering different questions.
- Detection gap
- No state has a clean, real-time way to check citizenship at registration. Federal immigration databases record that a person was once a noncitizen, not reliably that they have since naturalized. That single technical fact drives both the administration's claim that the problem is undercounted and the officials' claim that federal "matches" wrongly flag citizens[8][11].
- Legal exposure runs downhill
- DOJ has warned state election officials they could face criminal penalties if noncitizens vote[16]. That shifts the risk calculus for a county registrar: over-purging costs an official nothing personally, under-purging might. The incentive pushes toward removals regardless of who wins the argument.
Material realityFive people have been charged and face trial. Two of the cases carry maximum sentences of one year; two carry 10 and 11 years[1]. Whatever the national argument, those outcomes are decided by juries applying a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard, and the statutes generally require proof the person knew the citizenship statement was false. Separately, the roll-maintenance machinery is moving now: DHS agents are working cases in nine states through mid-October, states are under federal demands for voter data, and ballots for November are already going out[7]. That sequencing is the part with the largest practical footprint. A prosecution touches one person. A purge based on a preliminary match can touch thousands, and the people most likely to be flagged are naturalized citizens — who are eligible and whose records show a prior noncitizen status. Meanwhile the audits that both sides cite are real and public: Georgia found 20 noncitizens in 8.2 million registrations, Ohio found 597 registrants and 138 apparent voters in a similar-sized roll[11][12]. Both of those are true at once, and neither is the same as the 250,000 figure DHS has cited, which PolitiFact reported is a preliminary match count equal to about 0.6% of registrations in four states[8].
Narrative as a weaponThree groups are actively shaping how this is read. The Justice Department and DHS want you to believe the cases are the visible tip of a real and previously ignored problem, and they package it accordingly — arrest video, swing-state geography, maximum sentences, a nine-state surge timed to the pre-election window. Democratic officials and voting-rights groups want you to believe the count is the story: that an 18-month, multi-agency hunt yielding five charges is itself the finding, and that the announcement's timing reveals its purpose. Right-leaning media want you to believe the swing-state locations matter to outcomes, which no charging document claims. Notice what nobody is arguing: no side says these five people are being prosecuted for something that is legal, and no side has produced evidence that any 2022 or 2024 result turned on noncitizen votes. The fight is over what a small number of real cases means — and each camp has chosen the denominator that answers its own question.
How Each Side Sees It
Each major actor’s view — how it frames things, its underlying incentive, and how it’s materially affected. Tap a side to read it.
Frames it asTheir strongest case is a rule-of-law one, and it does not depend on the numbers being large. Congress wrote a law: noncitizens may not vote in federal elections. A law that is never enforced is not really a law. If prosecutors ignore violations because each one is small, the rule becomes advisory. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has framed it exactly that way — the department "stands ready to enforce the laws Congress enacted to ensure only American citizens vote in federal elections"[16]. Their second argument is about detection, not scale. Noncitizen voting is hard to catch because most states have no direct way to check citizenship against a registration form. So a low count of prosecutions may reflect weak detection rather than a small problem — and building a federal capability to match immigration records against voter rolls is how you find out[7]. Third: citizenship is the one line that defines who gets a say. Diluting it, even a little, is a harm to every citizen's vote that no recount can undo[4].
WhyThe administration has argued since 2020 that U.S. elections are vulnerable to noncitizen voting, and has struggled in both terms to bring cases showing significant fraud[3]. Concrete indictments convert a contested claim into a documented one. A visible enforcement record before November also supports the political case for proof-of-citizenship registration rules[17].
Impact on themEach prosecution is a real test of the department's evidence in open court, where the burden is beyond a reasonable doubt. Acquittals or dismissals would be costly. The department also drew criticism for using Homeland Security Investigations — an immigration-enforcement arm — and for publicizing arrest video, which shapes how the cases are received before any trial[3][7].
Frames it asTheir strongest argument is about proportion and method, not about whether the five people did it. The government spent roughly 18 months demanding state voter files and running a multi-agency search. The visible result is five charges, plus about 41 alleged noncitizen voters charged federally between January 2025 and May 2026[14]. Set against roughly 155 million ballots cast in a presidential year, that is a rate near zero. A 2017 Brennan Center study of 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions found 30 suspected noncitizen-voting incidents — 0.0001% of votes cast[10]. Second, and more serious to them: the timing and packaging. Charges announced with arrest video weeks before an election are not just law enforcement; they are a message about the election's integrity. They argue that message lays groundwork to challenge results the administration dislikes[17]. Third, they say the enforcement drive has a cost borne by lawful voters — aggressive roll purges based on preliminary matches tend to catch naturalized citizens, because federal immigration databases record when someone was an immigrant, not always when they stopped being one[8].
WhyThey want to keep registration accessible and to prevent a fraud narrative from becoming the basis for contesting midterm outcomes. Democrats also have a direct electoral stake in high turnout in the three states named.
Impact on themPennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin are competitive states with contested 2026 races. If the enforcement push produces purges or drives down registration among immigrant communities, the effect falls disproportionately on Democratic-leaning voters[8].
Frames it asTheir argument is institutional and cuts across party. They run the rolls and say the safeguards mostly work. Pennsylvania's Republican Secretary of State Al Schmidt said the state's rolls are "properly maintained and updated" and that noncitizen voting is extremely rare in Pennsylvania[8]. Georgia's own audit is the evidence they lean on: 20 noncitizens found in 8.2 million registrations, and the 9 who had voted all predated the state's 2012 verification rules — meaning the fix already worked[11]. Their second point is practical. Preliminary federal "matches" are not findings. A name-and-date-of-birth hit against an immigration database can flag a person who has since naturalized. Acting on raw matches removes eligible citizens[8]. Their third point is jurisdictional: DOJ has warned state officials they could face criminal penalties if noncitizens vote, which they say pushes officials toward over-purging to protect themselves[16].
WhyOfficials of both parties have a professional stake in defending the accuracy of systems they built and administer, and in resisting federal control of state voter files.
Impact on themThey face federal demands for voter data on short deadlines, potential personal legal exposure, and the operational burden of re-checking rolls weeks before ballots go out[16].
Frames it asThe defendants have not entered public pleadings covered in the reporting reviewed here, so their arguments are not yet on the record. The general defense advanced in comparable cases is that registration is often not a knowing crime: motor-vehicle offices and online registration systems present the citizenship question as a checkbox, and a noncitizen with a driver's license may be registered without understanding what was signed. That matters legally, because the federal statutes here require a false statement, which normally means the person knew it was false[1]. Immigrant-advocacy groups add that the deterrent effect reaches far beyond the guilty: a naturalized citizen who sees an ICE-affiliated arrest video over a ballot may simply not vote[3].
WhyAvoiding prison and, for noncitizens, avoiding deportation — a conviction here is typically removable conduct regardless of the sentence.
Impact on themHoltzman faces up to 10 years and Rodriguez up to 11; Guzman and Cardoso face up to one year each[1]. For the noncitizen defendants, immigration consequences may exceed the criminal ones.
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The Bias Ledger average rating 5.4
The same story, as framed by outlets across the spectrum, ordered least to most biased. The bias score (1 = straight, 10 = heavily spun) is an AI assessment of that framing — click an outlet to see its track record. The tell is the word choice or omission that reveals the angle.
| Outlet | Vantage | Bias | How they frame it | The tell |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Votebeat | U.S. nonprofit election-administration outlet, foundation-funded; editorially sympathetic to election administrators | 2 | "Trump administration charges noncitizens with voting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey" | The headline is unusually plain. The framing shows up in the choice of context — audits and administrator quotes — which centers the question "is this common?" over "did these people do it?" |
| Associated Press | U.S. center / wire | 4 | "Noncitizen voting claims animate Trump's attacks on midterms and set up potential result challenges" | The headline is about what the claims are for, not about what the charges say. "Set up potential result challenges" is a forecast the story then supports, placing the prosecutions inside a post-election legitimacy fight before describing them. |
| NBC News | U.S. center-left | 4 | "Trump administration rolls out 5 voter fraud prosecutions ahead of midterms" | "Rolls out" frames the charges as a product launch rather than a legal filing, and "ahead of midterms" supplies motive in the headline. The body pairs the count with Trump's 2020 claims, which invites the reader to read the cases as political even though the two are separate facts. |
| Washington Examiner | U.S. right | 6 | "DOJ charges illegal voters from three states in 2022 and 2024 elections" | "Illegal voters" states the charge as fact in the headline; the defendants are accused, not convicted. The piece tracks the DOJ release closely, including the maximum sentences, without the denominator of total ballots cast. |
| The Federalist | U.S. right | 6 | "Report: DHS Launches Voter Fraud 'Surge' Probes In Nine States" | Frames the enforcement push as vindication of long-standing warnings. Puts scare quotes around "surge" — CNN's word — while presenting the underlying premise of widespread noncitizen registration as settled rather than contested. |
| MSNBC | U.S. left | 7 | "Aggressive DHS hunt for voter fraud only finding a handful of possible noncitizen cases" | "Only" and "handful" put the verdict in the headline. The framing assumes the count is the measure of the program's legitimacy, which is precisely the point DOJ disputes. |
| The Gateway Pundit | U.S. far right | 9 | "Trump DOJ Charges FIVE for Illegal Voting in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin — Including Two Illegal Aliens from Mexico in Key Swing States" | All-caps FIVE, "illegal aliens," and "key swing states" together imply an effect on election outcomes that no charging document alleges. Splitting the four noncitizens by immigration status foregrounds the two without legal status. |
References
- Five Charged in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Wisconsin with Illegally Voting, Fraudulent Registration in 2022 or 2024 Election — U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs · U.S. federal government; the charging party in these cases
- Trump administration charges noncitizens with voting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey — Votebeat · U.S. nonprofit newsroom covering election administration; philanthropically funded, close to election-official sources
- Trump administration rolls out 5 voter fraud prosecutions ahead of midterms — NBC News · U.S. center-left broadcast newsroom
- DOJ charges illegal voters from three states in 2022 and 2024 elections — Washington Examiner · U.S. conservative; owned by Clarity Media Group (Philip Anschutz)
- Trump DOJ Charges FIVE for Illegal Voting in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin — Including Two Illegal Aliens from Mexico in Key Swing States — The Gateway Pundit · U.S. far-right advocacy site with a documented record of election-fraud misinformation
- Department of Justice charges 5 in Pa., Wisconsin, and NJ with crimes related to noncitizen voting — Pennsylvania Capital-Star · U.S. left-of-center nonprofit state newsroom, part of States Newsroom
- Exclusive: DHS plans to launch voter fraud investigation surge Tuesday — CNN · U.S. center-left cable and digital newsroom
- Fact-checking the Trump administration's count of 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — PolitiFact · U.S. fact-checking project of the Poynter Institute; frequently criticized by conservatives for rating asymmetry
- What to know about the Trump administration's claim that 250K noncitizens are registered to vote in 4 states — CBS News · U.S. center to center-left broadcast newsroom
- Noncitizen Voting is Vanishingly Rare — Brennan Center for Justice · U.S. liberal legal advocacy institute at NYU Law; litigates against voting restrictions, so it is an interested party, not a neutral referee
- Four Things to Know about Noncitizen Voting — Bipartisan Policy Center · U.S. centrist Washington think tank founded by former Senate leaders of both parties; donor-funded
- Noncitizen voting is very rare in Ohio and America. Not having proof of citizenship isn't. — Ohio Capital Journal · U.S. left-of-center nonprofit state newsroom, part of States Newsroom
- Report: DHS Launches Voter Fraud 'Surge' Probes In Nine States — The Federalist · U.S. conservative opinion-driven online magazine
- Aggressive DHS hunt for voter fraud only finding a handful of possible noncitizen cases — MSNBC · U.S. left-leaning cable news and digital outlet
- Honduran national charged with voter fraud in California crackdown — Fox News · U.S. conservative broadcast and digital newsroom
- DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote — NBC News · U.S. center-left broadcast newsroom
- Noncitizen voting claims animate Trump's attacks on midterms and set up potential result challenges — Associated Press · U.S. nonprofit cooperative wire service; center, widely syndicated