In the span of about two weeks this September, federal prosecutors in New Jersey, Kansas, and Florida announced charges or guilty pleas against five noncitizens accused of registering and voting in federal elections. The announcements came days before the Supreme Court cleared the way for the federal citizenship database that has helped surface such cases, handing the Trump administration a temporary win heading into the November midterms.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services promoted each case on its own newsroom, a notable shift for an agency whose releases normally focus on immigration benefits and fraud. USCIS does not bring charges itself. In every case, a U.S. Attorney’s Office filed the charges, Homeland Security Investigations or the FBI led the investigation, and USCIS assisted.
The pattern extends well beyond these five cases. The Justice Department has brought criminal charges against about 20 people this month under the federal law against voting by aliens, roughly 13% of all prosecutions brought under the statute since it was enacted three decades ago, according to a Reuters review of court records and government statements. An earlier Reuters review in July found that before Trump’s second term, federal prosecutions for alleged noncitizen voting were extremely uncommon.
The recent cases
In New Jersey, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged Patrick Terrance Reid, 61, a Jamaican national living in Orange, and Danubis Bernat, 49, a Venezuelan national from South Amboy. Prosecutors allege Reid voted in four consecutive presidential elections from 2012 through 2024, and that Bernat voted in 2024. Both were also charged with lying on their naturalization applications by claiming they had never registered or voted. That charge carries far heavier penalties, up to 10 years in prison, compared with a maximum of one year for the voting count. The cases were brought through the district’s Election Integrity Task Force, which includes the FBI, HSI, and USCIS.
In Kansas, grand juries indicted two people in separate cases. George Olawunmi Johnson, 67, a Nigerian national and lawful permanent resident formerly of Olathe, is accused of falsely claiming citizenship to register in 2010 and voting in the November 2024 election. Mariana Alexandra Dewey, 24, a Peruvian national living in Wichita, faces four counts related to registering and voting in 2024.
In Miami, Valery Zidor, 23, a Haitian national, pleaded guilty on September 22 to two counts of falsely claiming citizenship to register and one count of voting by an alien in the 2024 general election. She faces up to five years in prison.
The database behind the cases
USCIS’s main value to investigators is its records, which show a person’s immigration status and, in naturalization cases like those in New Jersey, what applicants swore to under oath. The agency has also expanded a tool that helps states identify potential cases. Beginning in March 2025, USCIS announced changes to its SAVE system and encouraged state and local agencies to use it for voter eligibility verification. As of December 2025, USCIS reported agreements with election offices in at least 22 states to use SAVE this way. Texas was one of the first states to run its full voter rolls, more than 18 million registrations, through the database last year.
That system survived a major legal test last week. On September 25, the Supreme Court agreed in an emergency order to let the Trump administration resurrect a national citizenship database using Social Security information for voter verification during the midterm elections. The order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal; that lower court had found the expanded system violated federal privacy laws.
The ruling was an apparent 6-3 along ideological lines, and the court’s three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented. The majority concluded the administration would likely prevail on the merits based on a 1996 statute granting DHS access to request sensitive information.
The practical effect before November may be limited. The court noted in its unsigned ruling that the National Voter Registration Act bars broad purging of voter rolls in the weeks leading up to an election, which it said limits the decision’s impact this year. A related fight also remains unresolved: the government sued 30 states to demand their full voter rolls but has lost 25 of those cases.
Reactions split along familiar lines. Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, said the decision makes it easier for states to obtain federal citizenship data to clean up voter rolls. The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, called the ruling deeply disappointing and warned it puts millions of Americans at risk of being wrongly targeted by what they described as an unreliable database. Stephen Richer, the Republican former top election official in Arizona’s largest county, said the ruling could be a positive step “if used responsibly.”
The scale question
Supporters of the crackdown argue that each case shows the system can be exploited and that enforcement deters future violations. Critics point to how rare the cases are relative to overall turnout. An April 2026 USCIS statement found that only 0.03% of records run through SAVE merited additional review as possible noncitizens, and subsequent review by state and local officials shrank those numbers further, according to the Center for Election Innovation & Research. State audits point the same way: Michigan found 15 potential noncitizen votes out of more than 5.7 million cast in 2024, and Iowa found 35 out of nearly 1.7 million. Reuters noted that the recent uptick in prosecutions represents a small fraction of the tens of millions of ballots cast in federal elections.
The timing has also drawn scrutiny. The increase in prosecutions comes as the administration presses claims of widespread election fraud ahead of the November midterms.
Legal challenges ahead
Some defendants are fighting back on constitutional grounds. Five people prosecuted in separate federal cases in Miami and Madison, Wisconsin, have argued for the first time in court that the 1996 law used to charge them is unconstitutional, according to Reuters. A ruling for the defendants, which could come before the November 3 midterms, would raise questions about the federal government’s authority to prosecute noncitizen voting cases.
The SAVE case itself is also not over. Because the Supreme Court acted on its emergency docket, the underlying challenge will continue in the lower courts, leaving the database’s long-term legal footing unsettled even as it remains in use.
All defendants in pending cases are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
About the Author
Discover more from Immigration Analytics
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
