Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
The Trump administration has not only escalated violence against immigrants in recent weeks with the deaths of two Latino workers and fathers at the hands of ICE agents. Now it is also accusing them of fraudulently registering to vote in an attempt to intimidate and frighten voters and undermine Americans’ confidence in the electoral system ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
In other words, this administration’s attacks on immigrants are not limited to the violence perpetrated by its immigration agents on the streets and in detention centers—violence that has claimed lives. And they do so with total impunity. The New York Times reported that local FBI offices will not be able to investigate confrontations with ICE agents, as DHS itself will handle those investigations. All of this is done to ensure there is no accountability.
Moreover, according to Border Czar Tom Homan, the most recent victims of ICE—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián in Maine—would still be alive if they had followed the agents’ orders.
But in addition to being targets of violence, immigrants are a key element in Trump’s campaign to push the SAVE America Act—a measure that, under the pretext of preventing non-citizens from fraudulently voting in elections, would deprive 21 million Americans who lack access to the documents required to vote of their right to vote.
The measure would require a passport or birth certificate to register, the presentation of official photo identification to vote, and would compel states to share their voter rolls with DHS to verify voter eligibility.
The SAVE Act does not have the votes in the Senate, and even if it were passed, it could not be implemented before the November election. But there are fears that Trump’s insistence is an attempt to interfere in those elections if the results were unfavorable to the Republicans.
An example of this was the speech he gave last Thursday, in which he insisted that the 2020 election—which he lost to Joe Biden—was rigged and that there was interference by the Chinese.
In the context of that speech, DHS stated that “more than 250,000 non-citizens are illegally registered to vote in these four states: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada”—states governed by Democrats.
It is not specified whether, as is often the case, this is an error-filled list, or false positives, nor is it indicated whether those individuals actually voted fraudulently.
New Jersey, for example, announced that a technical glitch allowed 6,600 non-citizens to be registered as voters, even though they had indicated they were not citizens when applying for their driver’s licenses. They did not fraudulently register on their own. Fewer than 400 voted.
But New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill pointed out that this is a fraction of the state’s 6.6 million voters, and the figure does not support the claim that this is widespread fraud that altered election results. They were registered as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, and were scattered throughout the state, Sherrill stated.
“As the Trump Administration tries to weaponize elections for political gain, I am ensuring we protect our elections… The difference is simple: when we find a problem, we don’t hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies. We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public,” Sherrill posted to X.
Experts agree that voting by non-citizens is not a widespread problem in the United States because a 1996 federal law expressly prohibits them from voting in federal elections. Those who do so face severe penalties, including fines, imprisonment (or both), inadmissibility, and even deportation.
In 2017, the Brennan Center for Justice reviewed the votes from the 2016 general election in 42 jurisdictions across 12 states and found only 30 votes suspected of being cast by non-citizens, out of a total of 23.5 million votes cast in those jurisdictions.
But for Trump and the Republicans, perception carries more weight than reality, and the goal is to intimidate voters—especially those of color—with the threat of deploying ICE agents to polling places, even if it is illegal, and to sow fear and doubt by targeting their favorite scapegoats: immigrants.
Yet the only ones who tried to steal an election—the 2020 election—were Trump and the mob of supporters who led a bloody assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
The original Spanish version is here.
