Trump DoJ indicts 10 individuals on noncitizen voting related charges in Minnesota

The US Department of Justice indicted another 10 individuals on noncitizen voting related charges on Wednesday as Donald Trump’s administration continues to pursue allegations of voter fraud raised by the president.

In the sixth announcement of its kind this month, the attorney general, Todd Blanche, and homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said 10 people in Minnesota were charged with making false claims about citizenship to vote, or voting as a noncitizen.

“Elections today are often decided by a small number of votes and that’s why these investigations and prosecutions matter,” Blanche told reporters during a press conference, in the latest bid by senior Trump officials to heighten concerns about voter fraud.

While there is no evidence that fraudulent voting is a substantial problem, Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded allegations while claiming the electoral process is rigged against them. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank that often supports the administration’s initiatives, maintains a database of noncitizen voting – and identified 100 cases from 1982 to 2025. As the New York Times has noted, that represents 0.000008% of the 1.3bn votes cast in presidential elections over that period.

Mullin went further than Blanche on Wednesday, suggesting that voting machines were not secure. “We’ve had some trouble with some machines,” he said, without providing evidence, but adding: “Can’t say that it was fraud or not fraud.”

Administration officials have sought to support Trump’s longstanding unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in US elections through investigations and indictments related to election concerns.

Trump has sought to undermine public confidence in US elections by promoting false claims of election fraud and making unverified claims of election insecurity. Earlier this year, the president heightened those claims in a primetime address.

The US president has also pushed through a crackdown on voting, ostensibly to secure elections – despite experts assuring voters that elections are already secure.

That includes directing his administration attempting to implement new rules to restrict mail-in ballot voting, a method of voting Trump has criticized, to create a federal database of eligible citizens and force voters to provide proof of citizenship when voting in federal elections.

Most of those actions have been challenged in court.

Noncitizen voting is rare and often associated with administrative errors. In a September 2o26 report, the Center for Election Innovation & Research found that “sweeping allegations about possible noncitizen registration or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data.”

Federal citizenship verification tools found that 0.04% of voter verification cases are returned as noncitizen, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Recently, New Jersey announced it found that more than 6,000 noncitizens had been falsely registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024, due to a system error. Of those, fewer than 340 voted.

Since early September, the DoJ has charged at least 24 individuals across 10 states with similar charges. In most of those cases, the individuals charged are lawful permanent residents.

The 10 individuals charged in Minnesota are all lawful permanent residents who either allegedly made false claims of citizenship to vote, or cast a ballot as a noncitizen, in the 2022 or 2024 general elections and 2026 primaries.

At least three of the Minnesota defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Guardian has reached out to attorneys representing nine of the individuals indicted for comment. One defendant did not have an attorney listed on record.

An attorney for Alan Barbu Kargb, a Liberian national with lawful permanent resident status who was charged with noncitizen voting and making false claims about citizenship to vote, declined to comment.