Trump has a new scheme to suppress the California vote this November. The threat is real

While many of us have been worried that we could see federal agents at polling places this November, it appears the Trump administration has been working another angle when it comes to potentially suppressing the vote — instilling enough fear that certain voters will simply be too afraid to show up.

By certain voters, I mean immigrant voters — naturalized American citizens who have earned the right to participate in our elections, but may be so anxious about drawing the dangerous eye of the Trump administration that they choose to sit this one out.

Wednesday, the good-fight fighters at the UCLA Voting Rights Project (which includes gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra) joined with immigrant rights group the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, in a lawsuit that, if successful, has the chance to stop not just the disenfranchisement of naturalized citizen voters, but also the whole Postal Service mail-in ballot mess.

“What we’re confronting today is not simply a question of databases or election administration. This is voter intimidation,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of CHIRLA and co-counsel on the case. “We will not accept fear being used to silence voters, and we will not accept new Americans being treated as less American because they were born somewhere else. No second-class citizens, no second-class voters.”

I want to tell you more about that lawsuit, but first let’s start with the fear. Trump’s election fraud drivel has always centered on the false conspiracy that Democrats are colluding with illegal immigrants to facilitate these folks in voting in large numbers in order to empower Democrats — never mind that Democrats keep losing elections.

There is now a nearly all-of-government effort, from the Department of Justice to the post office, to remake American elections to allegedly expose this — but in reality, it’s an effort to make it harder for any Democratic-leaning constituency to cast a ballot.

This matters because naturalized citizens make up about 1 in 10 eligible voters, and their numbers continue to grow. Nearly a quarter of naturalized citizens live in California, but enough live in swing states such as Nevada or even Georgia to make a difference in those elections. If someone were able to suppress this segment of the vote, especially in key races, it could change election outcomes.

As a bonus for election deniers, targeting these voters with false claims adds to the uncertainty around elections and helps cast doubt on free and fair results.

For U.S.-born voters, it may not be obvious that seeds are being planted in immigrant communities to discourage voting, but they are. Part of that is the Trump administration’s push to denaturalize citizens for various reasons, stripping them of that hard-won citizenship.

There were 50 such cases filed in federal courts in July alone — in all of 2025, there were only eight. The administration has said it would like to see up to 200 such cases brought each month.

Some of the folks in these cases have criminal records, but as with deportation efforts, the fear and the reality are that it’s often average people being swept up for little reason. So for a naturalized American, there’s a real concern that citizenship can disappear, because we are watching it happen in real time.

Couple that with the push for states to turn over voter rolls to the federal government, and the recent threat by the Department of Homeland Security to arrest people for illegally registering to vote — not even voting — and it’s easy to see where this is all headed.

Voter fraud is a serious issue and we should not dismiss it. But it’s clear the Trump administration is simply using it for political gain. And we’ve seen this movie before.

Remember DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s chainsaw-to-the-government effort run by incompetent kids? One of its many messes was the expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, run by the Department of Homeland Security. This program is meant to help other government entities decide who is and isn’t a citizen, but it is exceptionally flawed.

In fact, in one notorious example in Missouri, 35% of those flagged by the SAVE system turned out to be naturalized citizens.

The SAVE program acts a bit like an octopus, dipping its tendrils into various government databases to pull personal information. Musk’s folks expanded its reach into places such as the Social Security Administration, but in reality, where it’s pulling data and how it is using them remain opaque.

The federal government would like states to run their voter rolls through it anyway — recently, the feds sent a letter to California claiming it had found 190,000 undocumented voters on our rolls using that system and demanding California get in touch with them. Homeland Security further claimed it had found about an additional 60,000 noncitizens registered in three other states that refused to use the SAVE system, but has since backed down from those numbers.

Here’s the problem with the system. Say you have a Maria Lopez who came to the U.S. 25 years ago. Lopez signed her daughter up for state-funded day care, identifying herself as a noncitizen. Years later, she got a green card and, years after that, obtained citizenship. Along the way, she has filled out many, many more government forms, some as a citizen, some not.

She has gone by “Mary” instead of Maria at times because it helped her assimilate. Born at home, she was never really sure of her birth date, and has written conflicting ones on forms. For a while, she was married and used a different last name. And let’s not forget — Maria Lopez is a common name, shared by many.

So her personal information, spread over multiple government databases, is messy, incomplete, often contradictory and may even have been inadvertently combined with others who share her name.

None of that changes that she is now a U.S. citizen with the right to vote. Nor does it change her right to privacy — the right we all share to be free of some octopus database run by the federal government without transparency or trust.

But the threat that the SAVE program could be used to target her if she wants to vote does change things, because it puts her on the defensive, and maybe even on the line. What may seem like an administrative hassle for a native-born American could seem like the start of catastrophe to an immigrant. What happens if the system flags her? Is it worth finding out?

Last week, First Assistant U.S. Atty. for the Central District of California Bill Essayli, a Trump loyalist, provided a peek at answers to those questions when he announced what his office billed as the first arrest in a coming voter fraud crackdown.

The case involves a Honduran man in the San Fernando Valley who seems to have made the questionable decision to text arguably offensive messages to a Homeland Security officer after having been cited by that officer for impeding access to a federal building.

The Honduran man, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court, called the agent a slur describing a female dog and referenced the midterm elections, implying federal agents could be charged for crimes if Republicans lost power. He also implored the agent to “stop hurting my people.”

The federal agent claimed the reference to elections showed “intent to participate in the election process.”

OK. That seems like quite a stretch.

The agent then dug into the SAVE program and found the Honduran man is not a citizen but had registered to vote in 2025. There is no evidence the Honduran man ever attempted to actually vote, and he is a legal resident with a green card. Oftentimes in cases such as this, it turns out folks mistakenly registered when, for example, getting a driver’s license.

Now the Honduran man has been charged by Essayli with two felony counts of falsely claiming to be a citizen and falsely registering to vote. He faces five years in prison on each count and deportation. Again — he has never attempted to actually vote.

But it is a message sent and received. Make us mad, and we’ll put you under a magnifying glass, in the hot sun.

Which brings us back to that lawsuit filed by CHIRLA and the Voting Rights Project. They are suing under the Privacy Act of 1974, which covers how government agencies use our data, and the Administrative Procedure Act, which says the government has to follow its own rules when making rules. The suit joins others from various states arguing that this use of the SAVE program violates both acts.

If successful, it could prevent not only further attacks on naturalized citizens, but also Trump’s scheme to “screen” mail-in ballots this fall, by putting the SAVE program on ice when it comes to vetting voter rolls.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the end, after all the Trump claims that immigrants are destroying our country, if it was these very immigrants who protected the integrity of our elections?