The Justice Department charges 63 people in 15 states with voting crimes, and a federal judge blocks its voter list pressure on the states

The department's cases reach back across three election cycles, with the largest group tied to the presidential election of November 5, 2024. Four of the 63 defendants were described by the department as unlawfully present in the country. The citizenship status of the rest was not made clear in the announcement, and some are lawful permanent residents accused of voting while ineligible. In North Carolina, 18 people were charged, including a Guatemalan national in Robeson County accused of falsely claiming citizenship and voting in the 2020 and 2024 elections. In Georgia, prosecutors charged Benito Covarrubias Iniguez, 64, a Mexican national, with making a false claim of citizenship to vote in a federal election. In Tennessee, two indictments were unsealed on Monday, one against a Mexican citizen accused of voting in Haywood County in 2024 and one against a German citizen accused of voting in Fayette County in 2022 and 2024. In New Jersey, two defendants are accused of voting as noncitizens and then lying about it during naturalization.

The department said some of the cases in Monday's announcement had been filed earlier by individual United States attorney's offices and were gathered into the announcement the day before the vote. Every defendant is presumed innocent, and prosecutors must prove each charge in court.

The court fights run in the other direction at the same time. Judge Chutkan, an appointee of President Barack Obama sitting in Washington, barred the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from sending states lists of registered voters the administration says may not be citizens, and from asking state officials to separate out those voters' ballots or refuse to count them until citizenship is proven. She said the administration's data may not be reliable, which creates a risk that lawfully registered voters would lose their votes. The plaintiffs in the case say the letters violated the Privacy Act of 1974. The Justice Department told the court its letters to California and Washington were an effort to enforce the federal law that bans noncitizen voting, and not a separate policy open to court review.

Chutkan's order is the third courtroom loss for the administration's election push in a week. A federal judge in Los Angeles rejected the department's request to order California to set aside mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it said were likely not citizens, and a judge in San Francisco ordered the department to stop threatening state and local election officials with prosecution over ballot handling. Noncitizen voting is a federal crime. Reuters reported that all available evidence shows it is exceedingly rare, and the department's own announcement puts its nine week total at 195 people charged across a country where more than 57 million ballots had already been cast in this election alone as of Monday.