DOJ Charges 28 California Green Card Holders in Voting Cases
The Facts
- Federal prosecutors charged 28 lawful permanent residents in California with election-related crimes on Monday, arresting 11 of them as part of "Operation Protect the Vote," a sweep coordinated by all four of the state's U.S. attorneys' offices.
- The charges include making false statements in a naturalization application and fraudulent voter registration, felonies that carry a maximum of five years in federal prison. The Justice Department (DOJ) said 21 of the 28 defendants cast unlawful ballots.
- Among those arrested Monday was Omar Alexander Muñoz, 72, a Belizean national detained at his home in Commerce. Prosecutors allege he registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and in 2024 and lied on his naturalization application.
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The Spin
Republican narrative
Letting people check a box, swear citizenship and skip documentation is an open invitation to fraud. Every illegal ballot cancels out the vote of a lawful American, and that's a wound to democracy no state should shrug off. Enforcing citizenship requirements protects honest voters, and Sacramento's outrage only proves how overdue this unprecedented crackdown was.
Democratic narrative
A few dozen ballots out of more than 45 million hardly amount to the mass fraud being sold to the public. Rejected mail ballots from eligible citizens outnumber these cases by thousands to one, so the bigger threat to accurate elections is disenfranchisement, not phantom hordes of noncitizens. Staging armed arrests in the middle of a live election smacks of intimidation rather than integrity.
