The Justice Department terrorizes California green card holders

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · October 20, 2026

Federal prosecutors charged 28 permanent residents with election crimes and threatened local election workers to manufacture a panic before the midterm elections.

Dragging permanent residents into the courtroom to manufacture a midterm panic

The men and women who hold green cards and pay taxes in this country do not need federal agents kicking at their doors to remind them they are watched. They already know. When the Department of Justice announced it had charged 28 lawful permanent residents in California with election crimes, NPR reported that it did not do so to protect democracy. It did so to put on a show. Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter stood before the cameras and claimed that these defendants posed a threat to the republic. But the machinery behind these arrests operates on the exact same logic as Operation Streamline. The federal government uses mass criminal prosecution of low-level immigration violations to intimidate residents and deter others through a show of force.

Look at how the dragnet works. As ABC News detailed, federal prosecutors dumped a list of 20,000 names onto California election officials, demanding that they segregate ballots and verify citizenship. When Los Angeles County and Secretary of State Shirley Weber pointed out that this unverified list was a baseless attempt to purge voters, the Justice Department sued. They delivered a thumb drive with a password on a sticky note. County registrar Dean Logan quite sensibly refused to plug it into local computers because it failed every basic standard of information security. For refusing to fall in line, federal prosecutors threatened local election workers with felony prosecution for aiding and abetting a crime. This is not law enforcement. It is an act of political theater designed to terrify anyone who lacks a blue passport into keeping their head down.

A retired dentist and a confusing system built to trap the unwary

The human cost of this administrative violence falls on people like Dr. Kamlesh Navnitlal Shah. As The Times of India reported, he is a 67-year-old retired California dentist who immigrated from India and holds a green card. When federal prosecutors charged him with fraudulently registering to vote and casting a ballot, Dr. Shah told reporters the plain truth: "I thought I was registering to vote. I didn't know about my pending citizenship. I thought I must be a citizen. I had no idea I wasn't." He added, with the quiet bewilderment of a man caught in a trap he cannot see, that "nobody told me that he was not a citizen and was not supposed to vote." Research shows that legal permanent residents who register to vote often do so because the system itself is confusing. States use automatic voter registration through the Department of Motor Vehicles, or aggressive canvassers sign people up outside grocery stores.

Take Erick Ronaldo Soto Mendizábal, a legal permanent resident. When he registered with the help of canvassers outside a supermarket, he told poll workers he could not vote because he was not a citizen. What did they tell him? According to the investigator's affidavit, "they told him it was OK because they were going to check if it was valid or not." He cast a blank ballot anyway. Another defendant, José Probitsado Amaro, has lived here as a legal permanent resident since 1993. When he received a ballot, an investigator noted he filled it out because of the economy and the situation in California, confirming it was "not with bad intention" and that he "did not intend to defraud anyone." These are not masterminds stealing an election. They are longtime neighbors tripped up by a labyrinthine bureaucracy, yet prosecutors treat them like public enemies to satisfy a political hunger for convictions.

Defending the ballot box against federal intimidation and historical ghosts

The defenders of this sweep will argue that federal law is absolute, that illegal voting dilutes the voice of American citizens, and that the Justice Department has a duty to clean voter rolls before a national election. Trent McCotter put it plainly: "Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen." This argument collapses the moment you examine the numbers and the intent. Federal officials conjured a ceiling of 190,000 alleged noncitizens, quickly dropped it to a floor of 20,000, and then admitted through First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli that they did not even know if the people they arrested had actually voted.

As The Guardian reported, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber called the federal demands outrageous. She pointed out that treating thousands of voters as ineligible until proven otherwise violates federal law. Weber knows what state-sponsored intimidation looks like. Born in Hope, Arkansas, she was three years old when her family fled a lynch mob after her father refused to bow down in a dispute with a white farmer. When she looks at federal agents demanding unverified purges of marginalized people, she does not see a neutral administrative correction. She sees the old machinery of suppression wearing a modern federal badge. Janice Hahn, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, called the arrests what they are: "This is voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections." Esmeralda Muñoz, whose husband Omar was swept up in the operation, watched government officials arrive with camera crews and news helicopters and called it what it is: "It's a show for them."

The Department of Justice and Trent McCotter must immediately drop their threats of criminal prosecution against local election workers. They must halt their lawsuits against California, and cease using the criminal justice system to terrorize lawful permanent residents who made an honest mistake. Justice would require an immigration system that grants legal status and a clear path to citizenship to the millions who build our communities, rather than setting traps for them at the ballot box and throwing them in handcuffs for the cameras.

The Justice Department terrorizes California green card holders

Dragging permanent residents into the courtroom to manufacture a midterm panic

A retired dentist and a confusing system built to trap the unwary

Defending the ballot box against federal intimidation and historical ghosts

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