72-Year-Old Man Arrested in Trump’s Voter Fraud Crackdown Speaks Out

The Trump administration’s crackdown on supposed noncitizen voting led to 11 people being arrested in California, one of whom was a 72-year-old man who says he has never voted in a U.S. election.

Omar Muñoz, who was born in Belize, told Fox 11 Los Angeles that he is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. and has never registered to vote. Federal prosecutors, however, claim that he illegally registered to vote in Los Angeles County in 2019 and voted in four elections.

“No, I didn’t register to vote,” Muñoz told the TV station. He was not expecting to be arrested for anything. “I looked around and said, ‘I’m not a killer.’”

Muñoz said he could be a victim of identity theft, as someone once used his name and Social Security number to work in a chocolate factory. But the Department of Justice’s lists of noncitizen voters have been full of errors, particularly in Los Angeles County.

Last week, the DOJ sent a list of 20,000 purported noncitizens who are registered to vote to county election officials as well as California’s secretary of state. But in a court filing, county officials attested that the list was inaccurate, with only 7,000 people on it actually having Los Angeles County addresses. On top of that, it appeared to contain a lot of U.S.-born citizens.

The Trump administration is clearly sowing chaos and fear ahead of November’s midterm elections. The president’s underlings have demanded voter rolls from every state, taking legal action when states refuse. Acting on MAGA’s conspiracy theories, they’ve seized voting machines and ballots. Muñoz appears to be an innocent bystander in their efforts.

“Politics is a nice chess game if you know how to play. Unfortunately, they used me as one of their props,” Muñoz told Fox 11.

Armed federal agents are spending the days leading up to midterms going door to door asking people their immigration and voter registration status.

CBS News reported Wednesday that the draconian crackdown—a combination of President Trump’s mass deportation effort and his desperate attempt to manufacture proof of election fraud—was already underway in multiple states, having accelerated last month.

“HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CBS, using an acronym for Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations arm. “Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.”

This effort can be traced back to June, when DHS ordered ICE to specifically target noncitizens who were allegedly voting in elections. The department has claimed that there could be as many as 250,000 fraudulent voters—even though only 156 people have been charged thus far. And that 250,000 number is widely debated, as states say the federal government gave them lists of noncitizen voters riddled with inaccuracies.

The home visits have increased regardless. On Monday, DHS announced that they arrested 11 people in Los Angeles, all of them green card holders. One of those arrested, a 72-year-old Belizean man, said he had never voted and couldn’t remember having registered to vote.

This gestapo-level action was part of the plan all along, especially as Trump grasps for any possible way to suppress votes against him and his party in November. This will not only lead to unlawful arrests, but it will also have a chilling effect on legal voters who may be naturalized citizens, or who just happen to not be white.

“Once again, this has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. Trump has turned DHS into his own federal police force,” former Biden immigration adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. “Whether he deploys them to find fraud, harass nonprofits, or question naturalized citizens, he keeps expanding the scope of their duties.”

Even in the deep red state of Florida, Americans are feeling a bit more liberal.

Republicans are still projected to win the Sunshine State, but by a much smaller margin: Early voting results out of Florida revealed a massive Democratic shift compared to the last election cycle.

On the first day of early voting in 2024, Republicans led by 24.7 percentage points. On Monday, the party led by a mere fraction of a percentage point—marking a 24.4 percent shift toward the Democratic Party.

That pattern remained true through the second day of early voting, as well. At the same point in the race in 2024, Republicans held a 26.1 percent advantage. On Tuesday, they were ahead by just 2.4 percent, a 23.8 percent shift, according to data shared by VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini.

“I expect this shift to narrow substantially, but yesterday was another decent day for Democrats in FL,” Donnini wrote on X Wednesday morning.

So far, more than 1.06 million ballots have been cast across Florida. Roughly 6.1 million remain.

Florida isn’t the only state feeling the changing tide. A blue wave is expected to sweep the country this year, potentially transforming both the House and Senate following an abysmal second-term performance by President Donald Trump.

A spate of election-bound MAGA personalities have already broken from Trump and his agenda in an attempt to curry favor with their local electorates. The growing list includes Florida Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar and Byron Donalds (the latter of whom is running for Florida governor), Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, and Texas Republican congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz.

Some hopeful office seekers have even stripped their websites and campaign materials of Trump’s name, taking advice that the White House offered in July when staffers explicitly encouraged midterm-bound Republicans to split from Trump and his sinking reputation.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of artificial intelligence and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

Nonetheless, Trump has insisted that the midterms should once again be a referendum on his popularity—a detail that isn’t likely to help anyone currently on the campaign trail.

President Donald Trump warned he’d send “no money” to poisoned veterans if Republicans did not win the House and Senate in November, marking a new low for his shoddy midterms campaign.

Speaking at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, Tuesday, Trump promised that if Republicans kept control of Congress, he’d direct the Department of Justice to “settle all remaining legitimate claims” made by the victims of contaminated water at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.

“If we don’t win, there’s no money. If we do win, you’re getting it, it’s going to be finally over with that nightmare that’s been going on for so many years. We will never abandon the heroes who served America,” Trump said.

But the president seemed perfectly willing to abandon veterans if he doesn’t see the results he wants in the midterm elections.

Trump claimed that the DOJ had already delivered $1 billion in cash settlements to veterans and their families who were exposed to the water contaminated with highly toxic chemicals between August 1953 and January 1987. The law that created the pathway for those harmed to receive compensation was first signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. Last month, the DOJ announced that it had made offers exceeding $1.1 billion, and had delivered payouts exceeding $879 million.

Making good on the government’s promise wasn’t the only thing Trump dangled in front of North Carolina voters: The president also pledged that the Department of Defense would invest $1.5 billion to produce semiconductor chips in the state. Trump made a similar promise that the DOD would invest $100 million in Kentucky to revitalize a drug manufacturing facility—but only if Republicans win the midterm elections. It seems like a lot of money to be bandying about, considering that he still owes every American $5,000.

The Department of Justice’s purported list of noncitizen voters contains quite a few people who say they were born in the United States.

In court documents filed Tuesday, Los Angeles County election officials wrote that a list that the DOJ provided to them with 20,000 supposed noncitizens voting in California was inaccurate, The Guardian reports. The department sent the list to the local officials last week and gave California 48 hours to hold the voting ballots of everyone on the list until their citizenship could be proven. After the election officials refused, the DOJ sued the state on Thursday.

Aman Bhullar, who works in the Los Angeles County clerk and recorder’s office, said in a court declaration that “among the records for which birthplace information was meaningfully reported, 38.9 percent indicated that they were born in the United States.”

County officials made observations of the list based on a sample of 200 people. Bhullar said in his declaration that 43 percent of the people on the list had a voter registration that was cancelled, 71 percent of people in the sample had never voted, and 86 out of the 200—less than half of the people in the sample—had been mailed a ballot this year.

The DOJ’s list contained other errors as well. The court filing asserts that only 7,000 of the people on the list had addresses in the county.

The list was put together by the Department of Homeland Security, which has not shared with California (or any other states) how it matches people’s voter data with citizenship records, despite demands from state governments looking for more information before complying with the Trump administration’s orders to hand over their voter rolls.

Los Angeles is not even the first locality to find errors from the DHS. The department accused the state of Nevada of having up to 16,000 noncitizens registered to vote, but not a single name was right. The Trump administration, despite its mistakes, remains defiant and insistent that states must comply with its orders.

“Just because an alien says on a form that they are a citizen doesn’t make them eligible to vote,” DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told The Guardian. “California cannot facilitate the violation of federal law. We notified California that noncitizens are likely registered to vote, and we asked the state to independently verify the citizenship of any ballots cast by people on a list that we provided. It refused to do so. Federal law doesn’t permit this willful blindness.”

Meanwhile, a select group of federal officials are actually working secretly with state governments who are alarmed at the possibility that President Trump will interfere with November’s midterm election results.