On Monday, federal authorities announced the arrest in California of at least 11 people, and charges against 28, alleging they registered to vote as noncitizens. Months of fears around the presence of federal agents at the polls and the use of armed immigration enforcement to affect national elections appear to be coming to fruition, despite the Trump administration’s inability to field meaningful evidence for claims of voter fraud or substantial voting by noncitizens.

The initiative, dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote,” comes in the lead-up to the midterm elections, where the Trump administration is making good on threats to weaponize the Justice Department and other federal entities in its favor over claims of supposed voter fraud. On Tuesday, the federal government sent election officials in Los Angeles County an unverified list of 20,000 people it claims are “likely noncitizens” registered to vote in California. As the New York Post first reported on Monday, federal agents used the list to make the more than two dozen targeted arrests on the basis of its voter fraud allegations. 

The Justice Department said in its Monday press release that federal law enforcement arrested “11 foreign nationals” against whom it will level criminal charges, including that they “fraudulently registered to vote in U.S. elections, electoral contests in which most of them cast illegal and fraudulently obtained ballots.”

The 11 arrestees are among 28 people the department officially charged—and all are from its list of 20,000 targets in the election. The press release claims that every person targeted is a legal permanent resident of the US but not a citizen.

“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen,” said Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. “California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”

According to Reuters, federal authorities gave election officials 48 hours to review the list and withhold ballots or face legal action. The officials rejected the demand, and the Justice Department sued for a court order to prevent California from counting ballots from the 20,000 people on its list. The Trump administration has since threatened local officials who process those ballots with criminal investigation and prosecution. 

“Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime, and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful,” McCotter wrote in a letter to county officials and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that was obtained by the Associated Press. “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

“Protecting American elections from criminal interference remains a top priority,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X, in reference to the New York Post report. “We will use every legal resource to hold those who violate our election laws accountable and defend every American citizen’s constitutional right to vote.”

The Trump administration’s operation in California, along with its long history of voter suppression—which my colleagues at Mother Jones have reported on at length—will not have an impact confined to California, or to the people on the Justice Department list. The voting public’s fear of subsequent actions, based on further unverified claims, cannot be separated from ICE’s track record of raiding first and asking questions later, a practice that has yielded the detention of hundreds of US citizens, repeatedly involving serious physical harm.

Even if the federal government sticks to its claim that it will not station federal agents at polling places, it is taking actions with indistinguishable, potentially further-reaching effects—in an election in which millions of ballots are already being cast.

This post was shared from Mother Jones.