Democrat election officials swear that illegal aliens almost never cast ballots in American elections.
Their friends in the press wave off every arrest as a campaign stunt.
And Markwayne Mullin just handed over a stack of files that turns their favorite excuse inside out.
ICE Rounded Up 13 Accused Voters and the Paperwork Ran Long
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 13 noncitizens accused of voting in American elections, according to Department of Homeland Security documents the Daily Caller obtained ahead of the November 2026 midterms.
The alleged ballots stretch back more than three decades. DHS says two of them came in 2026 elections, and one goes all the way back to 1992.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin skipped the bureaucratic throat-clearing. “The patriots of ICE have arrested dozens of non-citizens who illegally voted in American elections,” Mullin told the Caller.
“The Trump Administration will not allow illegal aliens to steal the votes of hardworking American citizens,” he added. “American elections are for Americans only.”
Now look at who DHS says it caught.
Two Honduran nationals, Juan Carlos Matute-Hernandez and Darwin Yoel Zelaya-Orellana, stand accused of voting illegally in 2026 elections. The department lists an arrest for driving offenses on Matute-Hernandez’s record and a conviction for a third-degree sex offense on Zelaya-Orellana’s.
DHS accuses Aden Hassan Aden, a Somali national, of voting in the 2020 election. His record includes convictions for domestic violence, drug possession, and larceny, according to the documents.
The 2024 election drew the biggest crowd. DHS names Mexican nationals Arturo Salazar Garcia and Servando Alejandro-Torres, Cuban national Jaimie Sosa-Sardina, Nicaraguan national Braulio Osiel Zapata Perez, Vietnamese national Mai Tran, and Venezuelan national Jose Luis Matute Chaviel. Spread across their files, according to the department, sit convictions for selling cocaine, battery, resisting an officer, burglary, larceny, fraud, illegal use of credit cards, disorderly conduct, and bail jumping, plus several drunk-driving cases and a cocaine possession charge.
Two more allegedly voted in 2022. Marva Marie Cook, a German national, carries a larceny conviction, the agency said. Jairo Ivan Vazquez Montano, a Mexican national, has arrests involving kidnapping and drunk driving on his record.
DHS also accuses Axel Bemjarmin Alarcon Duarte, a Guatemalan national, of voting in a federal election. His file lists charges for drunk driving, assault and battery on a family member, and shoplifting.
The Caller itself flagged that the documents don’t prove every one of these people stands convicted of an election crime. Courts exist for a reason, and every name above keeps the presumption of innocence on the voting allegations.
Acting ICE Director David J Venturella told the Caller that “these arrests, carried out in coordination with our federal, state and local law enforcement partners, are the result of careful, methodical investigations.”
“When the facts support criminal charges, we pursue them,” Venturella said. “Every eligible voter deserves an election process that follows the law.”
Twelve Trips to the Booking Desk and Not One Call to the Voter Rolls
Count the records again. According to the documents, 12 of the 13 had already tangled with police or the courts before ICE came knocking. Only the entry for Arturo Salazar Garcia lists no criminal history.
So picture a dozen separate moments when a booking officer snapped a mug shot, rolled fingerprints, and typed a country of birth into a computer. A dozen chances for somebody to ask the obvious follow-up question.
But a county jail and a county election office might as well sit on different planets. The jail knows where a man was born. The clerk knows his street address and which primary ballot he picked. And in too many places, nobody ever walks the file down the hall.
Sanctuary jurisdictions widen that gap on purpose. Plenty of Democrat-run cities and counties refuse to honor ICE detainers, so a noncitizen with a fresh arrest can stroll out the jail door before federal agents ever hear his name. DHS hasn’t said whether any of these 13 passed through a sanctuary jail. Every release under those rules still counts as a missed chance, whatever the charge.
Take Mai Tran. The department lists convictions involving fraud and the illegal use of credit cards. If DHS has the facts right, a person with fraud on their record ended up casting a 2024 ballot anyway.
Democrats insist a safeguard already exists, because anyone registering has to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re a citizen. That checkbox is the whole wall. And it asks somebody with fraud convictions on file to grade their own homework.
US Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) offered the standard Democrat reassurance during the House fight over the SAVE Act. “Non-citizens attempting to register to vote is exceedingly rare and if they do they face severe consequences including fines, up to five years in prison, and deportation,” Bonamici said.
Five years in a federal cell is supposed to scare people straight. According to DHS, it didn’t scare off a man with an assault-with-intent-to-murder conviction.
The wider numbers keep climbing, too. Mullin told Fox News that his department has 1,620 open cases, 151 arrests, and more than 300,000 suspected cases under review. “One is too many, but the fact that we have 300,000 cases we’re looking into right now and 1,620 cases that are under investigation, and 151 arrests is unacceptable,” Mullin said.
In October, US Attorney Ellis Boyle announced indictments of 10 noncitizens for illegal voting in North Carolina, and prosecutors allege one of them voted in eight elections across two decades. DHS separately told Blaze News that Homeland Security Investigations arrested a Cuban man named Andres Garcia, who it says illegally voted in at least 15 elections.
None of that proves noncitizens swung a particular race. Nobody serious claims a few hundred arrests flipped a presidential election. But “exceedingly rare” never came with a case count attached. It was a reassurance, and reassurances don’t come with case files.
One Clinton-Era Ballot Finally Came Due
The oldest case in the batch belongs to Phath Vorn, a Cambodian national. DHS accuses him of voting illegally in the 1992 election, the year Bill Clinton unseated George H W Bush. The department lists convictions for assault with intent to murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, and weapons possession.
Thirty-four years. Whole generations of voters came of age while that alleged ballot sat in the history books.
Before 2002, the United States generally didn’t send convicted Cambodian nationals home at all. The two countries signed a repatriation agreement that year, and Phnom Penh has dragged its feet ever since. When Cambodia quit issuing travel documents in 2017, President Trump’s first administration slapped visa sanctions on its officials, and Cambodia started taking people back within months.
DHS hasn’t explained how Vorn stayed in the country all this time, and his story may have nothing to do with Cambodian foot-dragging. But his file shows just how long one of these cases can sit before anybody connects the dots.
Mullin’s department has spent the year building toward this moment. In June, DHS directed ICE to pursue stricter penalties, including deportation, for noncitizens who vote illegally. In July, Mullin warned state election officials that tens of thousands of noncitizens sat on their registration lists. In September, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency rolled out its 2026 Election Infrastructure Security Plan.
Democrats Already Drafted Their November Excuse
Expect the usual chorus. Democrats will say the arrests landed too close to Election Day to be anything but politics.
But nobody timed a 1992 ballot to drop right before the 2026 midterms. The calendar complaint falls apart the second anyone reads the dates in the files.
And the public already picked a side. Gallup found just before the 2024 election that 83% of Americans favor requiring proof of citizenship from first-time registrants, with Republicans nearly unanimous and roughly two-thirds of Democrats on board. The SAVE Act would write that requirement into federal law, yet the bill keeps stalling in the Senate.
Watch what happens to these investigations if Democrats grab a gavel. The first target might be DHS’s access to state voter rolls, maybe even the funding for the agents running these cases down. Maybe that’s getting ahead of the evidence, since no Democrat has announced any such plan. But Democrat secretaries of state have battled federal requests for their voter rolls in court for more than a year, and old habits rarely retire on their own.
Twelve of the 13 people in this batch had already met a police officer, according to the documents. Not one of those encounters, as far as the public record shows, ever reached the clerk who keeps the voter rolls.
Sources: Daily Caller, “EXCLUSIVE: ICE Drops New Batch Of Illegal Immigrants Charged With Voter Fraud Ahead Of Midterms,” October 28, 2026; Fox News, “Justice Department charges 16 across multiple states in alleged illegal voting, election crimes”; The Post Millennial, “DHS investigates 1,620 cases of illegal noncitizen voting; 300,000 under review”; The Daily Signal, “10 Noncitizens Indicted for Voting Illegally in Key Battleground State,” October 16, 2026; Blaze News, “Man given legal status under Obama illegally VOTED in at least 15 elections, DHS claims”; Straight Arrow News, “House Republicans pass bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote”; Gallup, “Americans Endorse Early Voting, Voter Verification,” 2024; NBC News, “ICE deported 25 Cambodian immigrants, most of whom arrived in the U.S. as refugees”; The Cambodia Daily, coverage of the 2002 US-Cambodia repatriation agreement; The National News Desk, “Homeland Security secretary pushes states to crack down on noncitizen voting”