Attorney General Todd Blanche announced federal indictments of 10 foreign nationals accused of illegal voting in Minnesota, a case the Justice Department frames as essential to restoring election trust.
A federal grand jury has indicted 10 foreign nationals for alleged unlawful voting and registration offenses in Minnesota, Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday, putting hard charges behind long-running complaints about noncitizen ballots.
Just the News reported that the indictments cover nine counts of illegal voting by an alien and nine counts of making false claims of citizenship to register to vote, with alleged illegal voting tied to the 2022, 2024, and 2026 primaries.
Blanche stated the core of the case in plain terms.
"We are announcing that a federal grand jury returned indictments against 10 foreign nationals alleged to have committed unlawful voting and registration offenses in the state of Minnesota,"
That single sentence lands the point prosecutors want voters to hear: citizenship is not optional at the ballot box.
Fox News reported the defendants as lawful permanent residents, green-card holders, not citizens, and said they came from Liberia, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Bosnia, Germany, Ghana, and Lithuania. Most allegedly voted in the 2022 and 2024 general elections; one was charged only with falsely claiming citizenship in 2024 to register.
Under the charging framework described in that coverage, a false claim of citizenship to vote is a felony carrying up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Noncitizen voting itself is a misdemeanor carrying up to one year and a $100,000 fine. The message is not subtle. Paperwork status is not a substitute for citizenship when the law draws that line.
Blanche tied the case to a larger trust problem, not a one-off paperwork glitch.
"Voter fraud erodes the public's trust in our electoral system, and it's vital to our democratic process that we do everything that we can to restore that trust,"
He added that the most basic way the Justice Department can restore that trust is by making sure only eligible American citizens vote in U.S. elections. The department has charged more than 90 people with voter-fraud offenses since President Trump returned to office, according to the same reporting.
Cases like this sit alongside other recent enforcement actions, including an ICE arrest of an Australian national charged with illegal voting in two federal elections.
The Minnesota indictments did not arrive in a vacuum. Just the News noted that the state faced considerable scrutiny over alleged fraud by foreign nationals after an immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis earlier this year. The Trump administration has also increasingly examined the flow of public funds to individuals and organizations in Minnesota, with the Somali expatriate community drawing particular attention.
That backdrop matters because illegal voting is not an abstract civics debate. It is a concrete offense against eligible voters who play by the rules. When noncitizens cast ballots, or falsely claim citizenship to get on the rolls, every lawful vote is diluted by design, whether the margin is one race or many.
Similar patterns have surfaced elsewhere. A Peruvian national was arrested for allegedly voting in the 2024 presidential election in Kansas, another reminder that the problem is not confined to one state.
The Washington Examiner confirmed the Justice Department’s announcement of indictments against 10 foreign nationals on election-related offenses in Minnesota, matching the core of Blanche’s disclosure. That same reporting also described a separate judicial misconduct complaint Blanche filed with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, accusing nearly the state’s entire active federal district bench of discussing pending cases and showing bias against the Department of Homeland Security on immigration enforcement after interviews with the New York Times.
The complaint is a different fight from the ballot-box charges. Still, it underscores how heated Minnesota’s enforcement climate has become under the current Justice Department.
Federal law is not ambiguous on who may vote in federal elections. Citizenship is the threshold. Permanent residency, work authorization, or long residence does not unlock the franchise. The indictments allege that threshold was crossed, by false claims of citizenship to register, by illegal voting, or both, across multiple election cycles.
Blanche’s public framing leaves little room for the usual excuses. He did not describe a paperwork mix-up. He described unlawful voting and registration offenses, returned by a grand jury, against foreign nationals in a state already under fraud scrutiny. That is accountability language, not a press-release shrug.
Readers tracking the department’s broader election work have seen parallel moves, including coverage of how the DOJ charged 10 green card holders over alleged illegal voting in the same Minnesota matter as the story developed.
The open questions remain real. Individual defendant names were not released in the initial Just the News account. Court docket numbers, exact arrest or custody status, and a full country-by-country breakdown beyond the outlet reports were not fully laid out in the early articles. Those details will matter at trial. They do not erase what prosecutors have already put on paper: multi-year alleged illegal voting and false citizenship claims by noncitizens in Minnesota.
Election integrity also runs through process fights beyond criminal charging, including recent action as the Supreme Court cleared a Trump mail-in voting order in a 6-3 ruling weeks before the midterms. Different tool. Same principle: the rules of who votes, and how, are not optional scenery.
Blanche has made enforcement a hallmark of his tenure in other arenas as well, from prioritization fights to resource commitments at Justice. The Minnesota voting case fits that pattern: use the grand jury, name the offense, and stop treating noncitizen ballots as a third-rail topic too sensitive to prosecute.
Taxpayers and lawful voters do not owe anyone a free pass past the citizenship line. When a grand jury says foreign nationals crossed it, the remedy is charges, not another round of denial that the problem exists.
