Election Day: Federal Agents Arrest More Illegal Voters to Deter 2026 Fraud

Leah Millis for The Washington Post via Getty Images The federal government is arresting many migrants who voted in prior elections as they try to deter illegal voting in the 2026 midterms. “The feds are sending a message,” said William Gheen, founder of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC. “They are going after this [illegal voting], and their Operation Ballot Shield will help deter many illegal noncitizen voters.” But Democrats are fighting back via lawsuits and friendly judges. In California, for example, Democrats persuaded federal judges to bar the Justice Department from temporarily separating private ballots from perhaps 20,000 possible illegal voters. On Monday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against 63 individuals “in connection with illegal voting, fraudulent voter registration, and related election crimes across the country,” says a November 2 announcement that listed numerous illegal voters from many countries. On November 3, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the arrests of people from the Philippines, Italy, Finland, Algeria, and Iraq for voting in 2024. “If you vote illegally in this country, and you are NOT eligible to vote, @DHSgov will find you, hunt you down, and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said a November 3 post from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. “Only American citizens should be deciding American elections.” More charges were announced in California by federal prosecutor Bill Essayli: The Justice Department “is sending 1,000+ monitors & observers to all 50 states to help ensure a free & fair election,” said a post by Harmeet Dhillon, the department’s top civil rights official. “Every American’s vote should count.” Some illegal migrants illegally hand in their ballots. But many other migrants are used to register imaginary voters so their real ballots can be quietly and illegally redirected into the ballot box via the Democrats’ armies of campaign volunteers. Gheen’s ALIPAC collates public reports of foreign voters. Democrats use their urban political machines to convert migrants into voting power, said Gheen: The Democrats have been doing this for at least 20 years in different places in the country. They’re just rolling it out into more places. They’ve been incrementally expanding it. They like to work in the major urban areas where they can exert influence outward on the rest of the state, just like Chicago, just like Minneapolis, just like Charlotte, North Carolina. They’re using it to magnify their urban population city Democrat machine vote, and to give them the extra census and redistricting weight, as well as raw votes. What people are seeing in these initial [arrest] numbers coming in right now are the tip of the iceberg. “There are more than enough illegal noncitizen voters to give the Democrats a great deal of edge,” he said. “One illegal noncitizen voter is too much, and we clearly have large numbers, and each illegal noncitizen voter who casts a ballot is stealing the vote and voice of an American,” said Gheen. Unsurprisingly, Democrats and their lawyers are fighting to block penalties against illegal voters.