Seven charged in North Texas

Federal prosecutors charged seven noncitizens in the Dallas, Fort Worth area with election crimes. It is part of a Trump administration push to go after illegal voting before the midterms.

Indictments, arrests, one surrender

U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould said six people were indicted on Sept. 10 and a seventh was charged the next day. Agents arrested six over several days. The seventh, a fugitive, turned himself in.

A defendant with a record

Moises Arellano Alba, a Mexican national ordered deported in July, had a 2023 conviction for lying on a passport application. Prosecutors say he later claimed citizenship and voted early in Dallas County in 2024.

“So this person has already interacted with our office, the Department of Justice, and chose to then again commit a serious federal violation.”

Part of a wider push

Earlier this month the DOJ charged five people in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Wisconsin over illegal voting or false registrations in 2022 or 2024. Raybould says the Texas cases are only the beginning.

The act, not the candidate

Raybould says prosecutors care about whether federal law was broken, not who got the vote. In his words, anyone can vote for whoever they like, as long as they are allowed to vote.

“We don't even know who they voted for, frankly, like we don't care.”

Democrats cite a whistleblower

Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla released an anonymous DHS whistleblower complaint. It says staff on the "Unlawful Voter Initiative" were told to pull state voter records in ways that may break state law.

DHS pushes back

DHS says it took publicly available state voter rolls and checked them against noncitizens already in its systems. Raybould says Homeland Security Investigations has every right to use those databases.

“It's not rocket science; it's an easy step to secure our elections.”

Same method as health fraud cases

Raybould compares the approach to health care fraud work, where investigators scan Medicaid data for outliers and then pick who to look into.

“We look at Medicaid data to identify outliers all the time, to pick targets.”

Why he says it matters

Raybould argues every illegal vote waters down the votes of citizens and weakens democracy. He says prosecuting it should have support from both parties.

Mostly green card holders

Six of the seven are lawful permanent residents from Nigeria, Mexico, India and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, aged 20 to 69. Several allegedly claimed citizenship to register and voted in November 2024.

Rejected ballots still count

Carlos Salas Barrios and Celestin Katubadi each allegedly cast a provisional ballot in Tarrant County in 2024. Both ballots were rejected, but prosecutors say casting them still broke Texas and federal law.

Getting around the time limit

Joshua Akpom allegedly registered in 2017 and voted in 2018, which is past the five-year statute of limitations. So prosecutors charged him with denying that history on his 2026 naturalization application.