Trump Said 278,000 Noncitizens Were Registered to Vote. A Judge Just Threw Out the Dragnet Built to Find Them. Three Days Later, the DOJ Announced 16 Cases.
The DOJ demanded Social Security numbers for every voter in 49 states, lost in court again Friday, and its Monday haul was mostly green card holders and a widower with his late wife’s ballot
By Mike Dean,
By Daily Rumble | October 13, 2026
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck down the Justice Department’s nationwide program to collect every state’s unredacted voter roll, run it through a federal immigration database and press states to purge the people it flagged. Her 78-page opinion found the department exceeded its legal authority and violated both the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, according to CBS News. On Monday the department answered with a press release: charges against 16 people in 11 federal districts for voting offenses reaching back to 2022. Eleven of the 16 are lawful permanent residents, by the department’s own description. One is a 62-year-old New Mexico man accused of trying to cast his dead wife’s absentee ballot. In July, President Trump told the country in a prime-time address that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote.
Huge Announcement Just Dropped at DRN
Step back and look at the sequence. Trump orders a crackdown on noncitizen voting. The Justice Department demands complete voter files from 49 states and Washington, D.C., with names, birthdates, home addresses, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Eighteen states hand them over. Most refuse, the department sues them, and it loses almost every case. A federal judge then rules the whole program unlawful. Three days after that, 22 days before the midterms, the department announces 16 scattered prosecutions and calls it election integrity.
That sequence forces a question the department would rather nobody ask: if the fraud is as large as the president says, where is it? And if more than a year of demands, lawsuits and database runs produced 104 cases by the department’s own count, what was all that voter data actually for?
The ruling that ended the dragnet
The program began after Trump directed the attorney general to prioritize “election integrity” enforcement against states that did not cooperate, Democracy Docket reported. At least 18 states, mostly Republican-led, handed over complete rolls, according to Al Jazeera. The department shared their files with the Department of Homeland Security, which ran them through the SAVE citizenship database, and the states agreed to “clean” flagged voters within 45 days. The Civil Rights Division also agreed to hand state voter files to Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE, per Democracy Docket.
Sooknanan took that apart. The department “cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” she wrote, in language quoted by CBS and CNN. “The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” she wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.” The department had argued that every registered voter could be treated as the subject of a voter fraud investigation. She called that reading “nonsensical,” Democracy Docket reported, and wrote that the policy “has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more.” One of the plaintiffs, Texas voter Anthony Nel, said he was one of them. “No other voter should have to go through what I did,” he said in a statement released by Common Cause.
The order covers the files the department already holds, not just the ones it is still fighting over. It also lands on top of a losing streak: the department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for refusing to turn over data, and 26 of those cases have been dismissed, according to Al Jazeera. A department spokesperson told CBS it is reviewing the decision. The administration is not out of moves, since the Supreme Court last month paused Sooknanan’s separate June order blocking the expanded SAVE database. For this election, federal law bars systematic purges in the 90 days before Nov. 3.
Sixteen cases, read closely
Monday’s release came from the Office of the Attorney General and quotes nobody. Read the list and the picture is small. Stanley Walton, 82, a Canadian green card holder in Idaho, is charged over a single vote in the 2022 general election. Silvia Delgado Phelps, 78, a Peruvian permanent resident, is accused of voting in Baldwin County, Alabama. Patrick Perea, 62, of Albuquerque, is indicted on one count for allegedly submitting his deceased wife’s absentee ballot in November 2024. Forrest Scott Woody, 68, of Hendersonville, North Carolina, is accused of voting in both North Carolina and Alabama in 2024.
The two cases with long histories are Cary Ann Patterson, 59, a British permanent resident in Ohio accused of voting in at least 10 elections, and Andres Garcia, 64, a Cuban permanent resident in Missouri who allegedly claimed citizenship on registration forms in 2004 and 2013. Nothing in the release alleges coordination or a single changed outcome. The department’s own boilerplate says the filings “merely contain accusations.”
This is the second batch of exactly 16. The first, announced on a Friday evening in September, included Monica Carzoli, a Texas teacher of 28 years and a permanent resident, according to Votebeat. The department posted on social media that day: “Let this be a warning to ANYONE trying to cheat and undermine our elections,” Fox News reported. Department figures given to Fox News Digital and cited by Latin Times put the running total at 64 foreign nationals charged across 17 states in about five weeks, and 104 people charged with voting-related offenses since January 2025.
What’s actually happening beneath the surface
Hold 104 next to 278,000. That larger number came from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in July, and 250,000 of it came from a DHS review of public voting data in Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, four states that had refused to hand over their rolls. Officials did not explain how they determined anyone’s citizenship from public records, The Washington Post reported. Pennsylvania’s Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth, Al Schmidt, called noncitizen voting “extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.” Georgia’s 2024 review of 8.2 million registrations found 20 noncitizens who had registered and nine instances of one casting a ballot, per an ABC News fact check. The Brennan Center’s survey of the 2016 election found 30 suspected incidents in 23.5 million votes.
Then look at what Mullin told Fox News in September: 1,620 open cases, 151 arrests, and 300,000 more names under review, drawn from “a list compiled from states’ voter rolls,” according to Just the News. Sooknanan’s order now bars the department from running the rolls it collected through exactly that kind of citizenship check. Note what is missing from Monday’s release: any mention of the ruling, of SAVE, or of how many of those 300,000 names became one of the 16.
The number is the product. Each batch of 16 is built to be read as a headline, not a docket. Meanwhile the judge found that the machine behind the headlines removed actual citizens from the rolls in their home states. That is the trade on offer: eligible Americans purged so the department can announce an 82-year-old Canadian in Idaho three weeks before an election.
What to watch
The department will almost certainly appeal, and the Supreme Court’s pause of the June SAVE order shows it has sympathetic ears above Sooknanan. Watch whether DHS keeps the files from the 18 cooperating states, because the order says it cannot use them for this program. Watch whether a third batch lands before Nov. 3, and count how many defendants are green card holders who checked a box.
Nobody should vote who is not entitled to. The question is what a government will take from the rest of us to find the handful who did. This one demanded every voter’s Social Security number, purged citizens by mistake, lost in court more than two dozen times, and then held up 16 cases as the reason it was all worth it. You can do the arithmetic yourself.
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Sources:
CBS News — Judge strikes down DOJ’s policy of reviewing state voter rolls, saying it would “run roughshod over longstanding laws” — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-blocks-doj-state-voter-roll-policy-civil-rights/
CNN via ABC17 News — Justice Department ran ‘roughshod’ over civil rights with plans to audit state voter rolls, judge says — https://abc17news.com/politics/national-politics/cnn-us-politics/2026/10/09/justice-department-ran-roughshod-over-civil-rights-with-plans-to-audit-state-voter-rolls-judge-says/
Al Jazeera — US judge rules Trump administration’s use of voter data unlawful — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/9/us-judge-rules-trump-administrations-use-of-voter-data-unlawful
Democracy Docket — Federal judge shuts down Trump DOJ’s nationwide voter roll crusade, even in states that cooperated — https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-judge-shuts-down-trump-dojs-nationwide-voter-roll-crusade/
Common Cause — Federal Court Sides with Common Cause and Voters, Ruling DOJ Data Demands Violate Voter Privacy, States’ Election Authority — https://www.commoncause.org/press/federal-court-sides-with-common-cause-and-voters-ruling-doj-data-demands-violate-voter-privacy-states-election-authority/
U.S. Department of Justice — Justice Department Announces Charges Involving 16 Individuals for Election Crimes (Oct. 12, 2026) — https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-charges-involving-16-individuals-election-crimes
U.S. Department of Justice — Department of Justice Charges 16 Individuals for Illegal Voting and Related Election Crimes (Sept. 18, 2026) — https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-charges-16-individuals-illegal-voting-and-related-election-crimes
Latin Times — 16 charged with election crimes, including a man who voted 13 times without citizenship — https://www.latintimes.com/doj-charges-16-election-fraud-sweep-total-reaches-104-ahead-midterms-600095
Fox News — Justice Department charges 16 across multiple states with alleged illegal voting, election crimes — https://www.foxnews.com/politics/justice-department-charges-16-across-multiple-states-alleged-illegal-voting-election-crimes
Votebeat — Feds charge 16 people across the U.S. with noncitizen voting — https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/09/21/16-charged-noncitizen-voting-michigan-wisconsin-texas-georgia/
Just the News — Department of Homeland Security investigating 1,620 cases of alleged voter fraud, Mullin says — https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/department-homeland-security-investigating-1620-cases-alleged-voter-fraud
The Washington Post via Anchorage Daily News — Trump claims 278,000 noncitizens are on voting rolls. Experts say that’s wrong. — https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2026/07/17/trump-claims-278000-noncitizens-are-on-voting-rolls-experts-say-thats-wrong/
ABC News via ABC7 — 2024 election fact check: Noncitizens can’t vote, and instances are ‘vanishingly rare’ — https://abc7.com/2024-election-fact-check-noncitizens-cant-vote-instances-are-vanishingly-rare/15479942/