Seven Charged With Noncitizen Voting in North Texas

Federal prosecutors in Fort Worth have charged seven noncitizens with voting in federal elections or falsely claiming U.S. citizenship, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas announced September 15. The same day, the Texas Secretary of State referred 117 more cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General for investigation.

Six of the seven were indicted September 10 and the seventh was charged by criminal complaint September 11, according to the Justice Department. Six are lawful permanent residents, citizens of Nigeria, India, Mexico, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The seventh, a Mexican national ordered deported in July, had been a fugitive until he surrendered to federal agents on the day of the announcement.

Six of the cases involve the November 2024 general election. Two of those ballots were provisional ballots that election officials rejected, and prosecutors say casting them was still a crime under Texas and federal law. One defendant is accused of voting early in Dallas County, and the release places the others it locates in Tarrant County. The seventh case dates to a 2018 vote that falls outside the five-year statute of limitations, so prosecutors charged a false statement on a 2026 naturalization application instead.

The FBI and Homeland Security Investigations field offices in Dallas ran the investigations, with help from the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit and the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office.

“When individuals who are not citizens cast ballots or falsely claim citizenship, they violate federal law, undermine the integrity of our electoral process and erode the public’s confidence in the fairness of our elections,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould. Indictments and complaints are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The Secretary of State’s referrals came out of a review that began last fall, when the office ran the names of all 18 million registered Texas voters through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE. The check flagged 2,724 registrations as potential noncitizens, and the state sent them to county registrars to investigate.

A manual review with the Department of Public Safety, along with the counties’ own findings, then cut that list down. According to the Secretary of State, 578 of the flagged voters showed they were citizens. For 506 of them, the proof was passport information that reached the federal database after Texas had already run its check. The office has told counties to reinstate any of those voters who were removed.

“We also have a responsibility to make sure eligible citizens can exercise their right to vote, which is why we are taking great care with this data and conducting additional layers of due diligence,” Secretary of State Robert Howden said.

SAVE is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2025, Texas became one of the first states to join a federal pilot program that lets states use it for voter-list maintenance. The state’s first pass did not check flagged names against Department of Public Safety records, which can show citizenship documents such as passports. That decision drew a lawsuit from voting-rights groups in March that is still pending in federal court, Votebeat and the Texas Tribune reported, and state officials agreed in May to check the DPS records.

The Texas Nationalist Movement has argued that Texas should verify its own voters. In a July 16 statement calling for a special session on election security, TNM President Daniel Miller called for “documentary proof of citizenship to register, verified by Texas, not by a database Washington sat on for years.”

The numbers released this week show both halves of that problem. Seven people are charged with voting who had no right to vote. And 506 Texans who did have the right were flagged as noncitizens because a federal database had not caught up with the federal government’s own passport records. Texas enforces the citizenship rule. Washington keeps the list it checks against.