Attorney General Todd Blanche announced federal indictments of 10 lawful permanent residents accused of illegally voting in Minnesota after allegedly lying about U.S. citizenship, a bid to restore election trust.
A federal grand jury has indicted 10 lawful permanent residents for allegedly voting illegally or trying to do so in Minnesota elections, including the state's August 2026 primary, Fox News reported.
Attorney General Todd Blanche made the announcement Wednesday at a Washington news conference alongside Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. Court records accuse the defendants of casting ballots in the 2022 and 2024 general elections after telling election officials they were U.S. citizens so they could register.
Each defendant was charged separately. Making a false citizenship claim to vote is a felony that carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Voting by a noncitizen is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year and a $100,000 fine.
Blanche framed the cases as basic election integrity work. Only eligible American citizens should vote, he said, and fraud chips away at public confidence in the system.
The 10 defendants are lawful permanent residents originally from Liberia, Lithuania, Ghana, Germany, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, and South Africa. Their ages range from 43 to 78.
Named in the cases are Bhator Konah Bryant, 61, of Liberia; Edvile Vaidoto Edmunds, 59, of Lithuania; Joshua Frederick Kofi Edzie, 63, of Ghana; Alan Barbu Kargbo, 48, of Liberia; Paul Kras, 78, of Germany; Fadil Rasim Ozegovic, 58, of Bosnia; Aparecido Donizetti Padovan, 62, of Brazil; Chris Adam Pettiquoi, 43, of Liberia; Christian Liam Schenk, 47, of Canada; and Hester Sophia Weihmann, 69, of South Africa.
Bryant stands out from the group. Court records show she is the only defendant not charged with voting illegally. She is accused of falsely claiming citizenship in 2024 so she could register. Kargbo is accused of voting illegally in the 2024 election and appeared in a Department of Justice photo flanked by Homeland Security Investigations officers.
These are indictments, not convictions. The government still has to prove the cases in court. That distinction matters, and Blanche's office is treating the filings as the start of accountability, not the finish.
Blanche told reporters the Justice Department has charged more than 90 people with voter-fraud offenses since President Donald Trump returned to office. That total includes 50 illegal immigrants charged in the past five weeks alone.
Mullin added that the department already has 10 voter-fraud-related convictions and more than 1,600 active investigations into similar conduct nationwide. The scale is not a press-release flourish. It is the inventory the administration is putting on the record while midterms approach.
Blanche also voiced frustration with how the cases land in coverage. "I don't know what the number is that will work for you guys. Whether it's 106, maybe it's 120," he said. "At some point, it has to become meaningful to to the media."
"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."
Blanche continued:
"The most basic way the Department of Justice can accomplish this restoration of trust is by working to make sure the only people voting in an election in the United States are American citizens who are eligible to vote."
That message fits the mandate that followed Blanche's hard-fought confirmation as attorney general. Election rules are not optional paperwork. They are the line between lawful ballots and stolen ones.
The same week, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration may use the SAVE database for voter-eligibility checks while related litigation continues. States can choose whether to use it. With midterms less than a month away, federal law generally bars states from running systematic voter-roll purges within 90 days of a federal election, so the near-term effect is limited.
A reporter asked Mullin how the department plans to use SAVE to flag ineligible voters before the midterms. He did not answer. The tool is available. The operational plan for the final stretch remains unclear in public remarks.
Lawful permanent residents hold green cards. They are not citizens. Federal law still bars them from voting in federal elections. The Minnesota cases allege people crossed that line by lying on registration forms and, in most of the cases, casting ballots in 2022, 2024, or the August 2026 primary.
Prosecutors are not inventing a new crime. They are enforcing a long-standing one against people who allegedly treated citizenship as a checkbox instead of a legal status. After a razor-thin Senate confirmation, Blanche is putting that enforcement in public view.
At the same news conference, Blanche announced a separate Justice Department judicial misconduct complaint filed with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. The complaint targets several Minnesota federal judges who spoke with The New York Times for a Sept. 17 article centered on an interview with Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee on the federal district court in Minnesota.
Blanche said the department has asked the 8th Circuit to investigate. Pending that review, he said the judges should step aside from every DHS case, criminal or civil.
Blanche put the request in blunt terms:
"We have asked the 8th Circuit to conduct an investigation, and in the meantime, we ask that these judges recuse themselves from every case involving DHS, either criminal or civil in nature, because of the obvious bias they have shown in this article."
In the Times piece as described in the coverage, Schiltz said ICE violated nearly 100 orders from the federal district court in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year, when federal agents flooded Minneapolis streets. He said the alleged violations likely stemmed from incompetence and staffing shortages at the Justice Department rather than willful defiance.
Schiltz answered Fox News directly. He said ethics experts confirmed he stayed inside the rules that govern federal judges when he spoke to the Times. He pointed to a February advisory opinion from the Committee on Codes of Conduct that says judges may speak and write on core judiciary matters such as the rule of law and judicial independence. "That is exactly what I did," Schiltz said.
The complaint does not resolve the underlying immigration-enforcement fights in Minnesota. It does put the judges' public comments, and DOJ's claim of bias, on a formal track at the circuit court. Democrats who tried to stop Blanche's rise, including in the fight where Fetterman refused to back the attorney general pick, now watch an AG who is willing to challenge the bench when he believes DHS cases are compromised.
Operation Metro Surge put hundreds of federal agents into Minneapolis earlier this year. ICE ran enforcement operations there in late January. The voter-fraud indictments are a different track from street-level immigration arrests, but they sit in the same accountability frame: status rules mean something, and paperwork lies have consequences.
Blanche's broader charging numbers, more than 90 voter-fraud cases since Trump returned, 50 illegal immigrants in five weeks, show the department is not treating Minnesota as a one-off. Mullin's tally of 10 convictions and more than 1,600 open investigations nationwide points the same direction.
Critics will call the cases small beer next to total turnout. That dodge ignores the principle. One illegal ballot cancels one lawful ballot. Ten indictments do not fix an entire roll. They do tell green-card holders, election clerks, and the public that citizenship is not a honor system when a ballot is on the line.
The path that put Blanche in the job included hard tradeoffs, including when Blanche scrapped a $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund to clear confirmation. The charging announcements are what that office looks like in practice: name defendants, state the statutes, and put fraud on the docket before the next federal election.
Open questions remain. Case numbers and full charge sheets for each defendant were not laid out in detail at the podium. County-level voting locations were not listed. The full roster of judges named beyond Schiltz was not published in the initial report. Those gaps belong in discovery and in the 8th Circuit process, not in a shrug that nothing happened.
For now the record is plain. Ten lawful permanent residents stand indicted in Minnesota for alleged false citizenship claims and, for nine of them, illegal voting across recent election cycles. The Justice Department is pairing those cases with a formal bias complaint against federal judges who took their ICE grievances to the Times. Secure elections require eligible voters only. Blanche is treating that rule as enforceable law, not a suggestion.
Citizens cast lawful ballots. Green-card status is not a spare key to the polling place, and a Justice Department that finally acts like it knows the difference is doing the job voters were promised.
