Who is charged and for what

The justice department announced on Monday that 28 noncitizens from across California were facing criminal charges for fraudulently registering to vote and casting illegal ballots. The defendants are lawful permanent residents, who hold legal status in the US but are not citizens and so are not authorized to vote.

The alleged offenses and the penalties prosecutors outlined include:

• •Making false statements in a naturalization application, charged as a felony that could carry five years in prison
• •Fraudulently signing up to vote, also a felony carrying up to five years
• •Lying under oath in voter registration applications, according to prosecutors

A justice department spokesperson said 21 of the 28 defendants had cast unlawful ballots.

Arrests and a wider crackdown

Eleven of the defendants have already been taken into custody and arrests were ongoing, according to the justice department. The announcement was not confined to California: federal prosecutors have filed charges against a total of 112 people across 20 states in recent weeks for alleged registration offenses and illegal voting, the department said on Monday.

The federal lawsuit and the 20,000-name list

The charges came days after the justice department sued California, demanding the courts block the state from tabulating certain ballots in the November midterms. Acting US deputy attorney general Trent McCotter sent a letter to election officials on Friday threatening to prosecute any official that tabulated a ballot from a noncitizen.

At the center of the dispute is the dhs voter list. The justice department previously sent Los Angeles county election officials a thumb drive that purportedly contained the names of noncitizens unlawfully registered, and demanded that officials within 48 hours confirm whether those on the list were citizens and set aside unconfirmed ballots. The lawsuit said the federal government had sent California a list of more than 20,000 people who it "believes are likely noncitizens" who were sent ballots. California, by recent state figures, has 23.1 million registered voters.

McCotter acknowledged the government's list might not be accurate. "There may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens. We're not perfect, and that's why we've asked California to cooperate with us," he said. He framed the figures this way: "Think of it like 190,000 is the ceiling, 20,000 is the floor. Twenty-thousand are the ones we're the most confident about."

California pushes back

California secretary of state Shirley Weber condemned the justice department's demands as "outrageous" and said federal officials had for months made "vague and unsubstantiated allegations" about alleged voter fraud in the state.

Her letter to federal officials last week set out the state's objections:

• •DHS first claimed in July that more than 190,000 registered voters in the state "may be" noncitizens, later revising the figure to 20,000
• •DHS has continued to refuse to share details about its data and methodology, Weber said
• •"Treating the thousands of voters on DOJ's list as ineligible until proven otherwise" would violate federal law against systematic removal of voters near a federal election, she argued

Experts called McCotter's prosecution threat legally specious and a blatant effort to intimidate officials. Nevada officials said last month that DHS had wrongly identified 185 people on the state's voter rolls as noncitizens.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the crackdowns are part of a strategy by the Trump administration to sow doubt in the results of the upcoming midterms. Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and election experts have raised concerns the crackdowns could disenfranchise US citizens.

According to the justice department, eleven of the 28 California defendants are in custody and arrests remain ongoing.