A 55-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia stole an American citizen's Social Security number, used it to obtain a passport and a Florida driver's license, registered to vote, cast ballots in the 2020 election and several others, and has now drawn a three-year federal prison sentence and a deportation order.
Carlos Felipe Jaramillo-Grajales was sentenced this week on four federal charges: making false statements in a U.S. passport application, aggravated identity theft, falsely claiming a Social Security number belonged to him, and falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen in order to vote. Federal prosecutors said a deportation order will be carried out once he finishes his sentence, Breitbart News reported.
The case lays bare a chain of failures. An illegal immigrant obtained one of the most sensitive identity documents the federal government issues, a U.S. passport, using a stolen Social Security number. He then leveraged that fraud to get a Florida driver's license, register to vote, and participate in multiple American elections. Every checkpoint that should have caught the deception failed.
Prosecutors described a years-long scheme built on a single stolen number. Jaramillo-Grajales took the Social Security number of an unnamed American citizen and used it as the foundation for a false identity. With it, he applied for and received a U.S. passport. He used the same number to obtain a Florida driver's license. And with the license in hand, he registered to vote.
He voted in the 2020 presidential election. Prosecutors said he also voted in "several other elections," though neither the specific races nor the total number has been disclosed.
The fraud extended into his personal life. Using the stolen identity, Jaramillo-Grajales married a foreign national who had arrived in the United States in September 2003 on a B visitor visa. She later secured naturalized American citizenship in August 2017. The couple divorced in January 2020.
After the divorce, Jaramillo-Grajales left the country for Colombia, traveling under the stolen Social Security number. His ex-wife also returned to Colombia, where she applied for a fiancé visa on his behalf, this time under his real name. The visa was approved. He flew back to the United States under his actual identity, and the two remarried in June 2025.
He then applied for a green card. That application, filed under his real name after years of operating under a stolen one, appears to have put him on federal investigators' radar, though prosecutors have not publicly confirmed what triggered the case.
U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe framed the sentencing as a warning to anyone attempting to exploit the immigration system.
"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."
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin went further, tying the case directly to election security. Mullin credited the investigators at Homeland Security Investigations for building the case.
"This criminal illegal alien from Colombia has just been sentenced to three years in a federal prison for identity theft and falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen. Because of his fraud, he was able to obtain a driver's license and vote in our elections. Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of Homeland Security Investigations, along with our federal partners, this criminal is out of our communities and, at the end of his sentence, will be removed from our country. DHS will always fight to protect the integrity of our elections, because election security is national security. Only Americans should be electing American leaders."
Mullin's statement underlines a point the administration has pressed repeatedly: noncitizen voting is not a hypothetical problem. It is a prosecutable crime that is happening. And cases like Jaramillo-Grajales's raise an uncomfortable question, how many others have done the same thing and never been caught?
Federal and state authorities have been pulling at the thread of noncitizen voter registrations for months. DHS has alleged that more than 256,000 noncitizens may sit on voter rolls in four states alone. The scale of the problem dwarfs the handful of prosecutions that have made headlines.
New Jersey recently disclosed roughly 6,600 noncitizen voter registrations, a finding that exposed a nationwide gap no state has been forced to close. In Michigan, six people were charged over illegal voting in the 2024 election, a case that renewed demands for voter ID requirements.
The Department of Justice has also brought charges against an illegal immigrant in New Jersey for voting in a federal election. Each case follows the same basic pattern: a noncitizen exploits gaps in identity verification, registers, votes, and faces consequences only after the damage is done.
Meanwhile, the political debate over voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements continues to split along party lines. Some Democratic leaders have resisted tighter verification rules, a posture that looks increasingly difficult to defend as the evidence of noncitizen voting mounts.
Jaramillo-Grajales will serve three years in federal prison. After that, immigration officials will deport him to Colombia. Those are real consequences, and they send a message.
But the sentence does not undo the votes he cast. It does not restore the identity he stole from an American citizen who had to live with the consequences of that theft. And it does not answer the most basic question the case raises: how did a man with no legal right to be in this country obtain a U.S. passport, a state driver's license, and a voter registration card without a single system flagging the fraud?
Prosecutors have not disclosed which elections beyond 2020 Jaramillo-Grajales voted in, or how many ballots he cast in total. They have not said whether his ex-wife faces any legal exposure for filing the fiancé visa application that brought him back into the country under his real name. And the identity of the American citizen whose Social Security number was stolen remains undisclosed.
The case is a clean illustration of what happens when the systems designed to verify identity and citizenship fail at every level. A stolen number opened the door to a passport. The passport opened the door to a license. The license opened the door to the ballot box. Each step depended on the last, and not one of them caught the lie.
Election security is not an abstraction. It is a chain, and every weak link in it is an invitation. Until the verification systems match the seriousness of the threat, three-year sentences will keep arriving after the votes have already been counted.
