Federal agents arrested a Bahamian green card holder with a lengthy violent criminal record in Georgia after discovering he voted illegally in the 2020 election, a case the White House says proves noncitizen voting demands aggressive enforcement.
Homeland Security Investigations agents out of Atlanta took Anthony Tyrone Higgs into custody on Sept. 3 in Decatur, Georgia, and placed him in deportation proceedings. HSI confirmed that Higgs, a lawful permanent resident who entered the United States in October 1976, cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election despite having no legal right to vote. He now sits in the custody of Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE division that handles removals, while the Trump administration moves to strip his immigration status entirely.
Higgs's criminal rap sheet reads like a catalog of violence. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin laid it out in a statement, as Fox News Digital reported:
"This criminal alien from the Bahamas has a rap sheet for multiple violent crimes, including armed robbery, domestic violence, and assault on a police officer. On top of all of that, he illegally voted in the 2020 election."
Beyond those offenses, Higgs's record includes resisting arrest, two counts of grand larceny, and two counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime. Nearly five decades after his admission to the country as a permanent resident, federal officials say he forfeited any claim to stay.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis did not hold back in an exclusive comment to Fox News Digital on Friday:
"This alien was a guest in our country who forfeited his right to be in the U.S. when he committed these violent crimes and voted in the 2020 election. Any noncitizens who vote illegally in our elections will be arrested and removed. American elections are only for Americans."
That language, "arrested and removed", signals a posture the administration has backed with action across multiple states. The Higgs case is not an isolated incident. Federal investigators have assembled a string of noncitizen voting cases stretching from New Jersey to Louisiana, each one reinforcing the same uncomfortable question: how did these individuals get on the voter rolls in the first place?
New Jersey alone has confronted the scope of that problem. The state acknowledged thousands of noncitizen voter registrations on its rolls, a gap that no state has yet been forced to close through binding federal mandate.
The Higgs arrest sits inside a broader pattern the administration has been building case by case. In August, a Colombian illegal immigrant named Carlos Jaramillo-Grajales was sentenced to three years in federal prison following an ICE investigation. Jaramillo-Grajales pleaded guilty after officials found he had committed identity theft to illegally vote in U.S. elections for more than 20 years.
Gregory Kehoe, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida, issued a pointed statement after that sentencing:
"Federal immigration laws serve to safeguard our nation's borders and protect the integrity of our government. Those who seek to circumvent, exploit, or break these laws will be prosecuted fully."
Then there is Mahady Sacko, a Mauritanian national arrested in Philadelphia through a joint ICE-FBI operation and charged with voter fraud. Sacko allegedly voted illegally multiple times going back to 2008. The detail that stands out: an immigration board upheld his removal order in 2002. He remained in the country for years afterward, apparently voting in American elections while living under an order telling him to leave.
That timeline deserves a second look. A foreign national ordered removed in 2002 was still present in the United States more than two decades later, and casting ballots. Whatever enforcement apparatus existed during those intervening years, it failed to execute its own order or detect the fraud.
HSI has also flagged a Slovakian national found to have voted illegally in the 2022 midterm elections in New Jersey, and an Australian national accused of casting ballots in both 2022 and 2024 in Louisiana. Neither individual was named in the federal disclosures. The legal effort to clean up voter rolls in New Jersey has itself become a legal fight, with the Trump DOJ asking the Supreme Court to restore a verification tool that a federal judge blocked.
The geographic spread matters. Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Louisiana, Florida, these are not marginal jurisdictions. They include presidential battlegrounds and states with razor-thin margins in recent cycles. When the administration says more than a quarter-million noncitizens may be registered to vote across key states, cases like these give that claim a face and a criminal record.
DHS Secretary Mullin credited the agents doing the work on the ground:
"Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of ICE, this criminal will be removed from our country and can never interfere in our elections again."
Meanwhile, efforts to verify voter rolls have met resistance in the courts. A Biden-appointed judge blocked the DOJ from accessing New Jersey's voter rolls even as the noncitizen registration scandal in that state was making national headlines. The legal obstruction has not stopped the arrests, but it has made the verification process slower and more contentious than it needs to be.
Even New Jersey's Democratic governor shifted her position, backing voter ID requirements after the scale of noncitizen registrations on her state's rolls became impossible to dismiss. That reversal, notable for coming from a Democrat, suggests the political ground is moving beneath leaders who spent years dismissing noncitizen voting as a myth.
One fact about the Higgs case cuts against the usual framing of noncitizen voting as a problem tied only to illegal immigration. Higgs was not someone who crossed the border without authorization. He held a green card. He had been in the country legally since 1976, nearly half a century. He still had no right to vote in a federal election, and he allegedly did it anyway.
His violent criminal history makes the case easier for the administration to prosecute in the court of public opinion. Armed robbery, domestic violence, assault on a police officer, weapons charges, these are not technicalities. But the voting offense is what triggered the federal response. The administration is making a deliberate choice to treat illegal voting by noncitizens as an enforcement priority, not a paperwork error to be quietly corrected.
Whether Higgs faces separate criminal charges for the illegal vote, or whether the case proceeds solely as an immigration enforcement action, remains unclear from the available federal disclosures. Either way, the trajectory is the same: arrest, custody, removal.
For years, Americans were told noncitizen voting was so rare it did not warrant serious attention. Case after case now says otherwise. The question was never whether it happened, it was whether anyone in power cared enough to look.
