Honduran National Charged With Fraudulently Registering to Vote in California

What Democrats have been telling us never happens, keeps happening. 

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced Friday the arrest of a Honduran national charged with fraudulently registering to vote in California — the latest concrete case after years of Democratic officials insisting noncitizen registration is vanishingly rare, a “myth,” or a right-wing talking point. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said Darwin Jonathan Rivera Flores, 30, of Winnetka, a lawful permanent resident who is not a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody on a federal criminal complaint charging him with making a false claim to U.S. citizenship and fraudulent voter registration. Flores was registered as “Darwin Rivera.”

According to the complaint, Rivera entered the United States in 2002 and has no record of seeking or obtaining citizenship. In November 2025 he submitted a voter registration application under penalty of perjury, checking that he was a U.S. citizen. State and Los Angeles County records listed his birthplace as the United States. 

Investigators found an online registration record, a certified application number, a receipt, and a signature image from the California Secretary of State’s Elections Division. He has not voted, prosecutors said. If convicted, he faces up to five years in federal prison on each count. Homeland Security Investigations is handling the case. 

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who has spent months demanding that California open its rolls to federal inspection, framed the arrest as the start of a larger accounting.

“Today’s arrest is the first of many to come,” Essayli said. “Unfortunately, because states like California allow non-citizens to easily register to vote and receive a ballot by mail, there’s no telling how many non-citizens are currently registered to vote. We again renew our request that California immediately comply with our requests to audit their voter rolls so that all voters can have confidence in our elections.” 

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division added that noncitizens who commit voter fraud “should expect to be prosecuted” and that the case should remind officials the department will enforce the laws Congress enacted to keep federal elections limited to American citizens. 

Honduran national living in the San Fernando Valley arrested on federal criminal complaint charging him with fraudulently registering to vote in the U.S. https://t.co/7mIjlxgIyn

— US Attorney L.A. (@USAO_LosAngeles) August 28, 2026

The single arrest lands against a much larger set of federal claims.

In July, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to secretaries of state in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania after a preliminary review of publicly available voter records against federal immigration data. DHS said there may be as many as 190,832 noncitizens registered in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania–more than 250,000 across the four states. The letters cited a smaller subset of stronger matches: 81,336 California registrants whose name, date of birth, address and Social Security number aligned with noncitizens in DHS files. Mullin gave the states two weeks to confirm they would collaborate and said election security is national security. 

Those four states had declined to run their rolls through DHS’s SAVE citizenship-verification system. 

California officials, including Secretary of State Shirley Weber, rejected the figures as unsubstantiated and noted the state had not shared its statewide voter file with DHS. Weber wrote that state law prohibits sharing Social Security numbers and other sensitive identifiers with the federal government. Nevada’s Secretary of State Francisco “Cisco” Aguilar called the numbers “wildly speculative.” 

The California Globe has tracked this fight for months. 

In December 2025 the Globe reported the Justice Department’s lawsuits against California and other states that refused to produce unredacted voter registration lists under the National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act and Civil Rights Act of 1960. 

In June 2026, Essayli’s announced multiple election-fraud investigations and the voter-rolls case advancing to the Ninth Circuit. 

Those stories documented the same pattern now visible in the Rivera complaint: a registration system that relies heavily on the honor system (a simple checkbox attestation of citizenship), universal mail ballots, and limited federal visibility into who is actually on the list. 

The judicial record is equally documented. 

In United States v. Weber, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California dismissed the Justice Department’s September 2025 lawsuit on Jan. 15, 2026. 

The government, as plaintiff, sought a full electronic copy of California’s computerized statewide voter registration list—names, dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers and voting history for nearly 23 million registrants. Defendants were Secretary Weber and the State of California. 

Carter held that the statutes the department invoked did not authorize an unredacted national-style file, that the request violated federal and state privacy laws, and that the executive could not “unilaterally usurp” states’ constitutional role in administering elections. He described the effort as an attempt to “amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data.” The Justice Department appealed to the Ninth Circuit; oral argument was heard in May. 

Similar district-court dismissals followed in Michigan, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Maine, Wisconsin, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and other states that withheld complete files. A minority of states, mostly Republican-led, provided data or used SAVE. 

Weber’s office had offered in-person inspection of a redacted database in Sacramento and argued that satisfied federal inspection provisions. The department rejected that as insufficient. California Democrats, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, later enacted additional limits on law-enforcement access to voter materials without a court order. 

As reported by the Globe:

Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 73 right before the June 2 Primary Election, authored by Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) with co-author Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange County) and Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), makes it a felony for law enforcement, including federal agents, to seize ballots, access voter rolls, or interfere with certified voting equipment without a court order or specific authorization tied to a violation of state election law, ostensibly to “strengthen California’s existing election safeguards in response to growing threats of election interference and intimidation, including efforts by allies of President Donald Trump to undermine confidence in elections and disrupt lawful election administration.”

California Democrats say they are trying to “Trump proof” California elections.

“California will not allow our elections to be commandeered by political intimidation, abuse of power, or chaotic interference from extremists chasing conspiracy theories,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “This law protects voters, election workers, and the integrity of the democratic process from election-deniers who want to undermine democracy.”

Essayli and Dhillon have repeatedly asked what the state is afraid of if the rolls are clean. Rivera’s case—a green-card holder who checked “I am a U.S. citizen,” whose file listed a U.S. birthplace, and who obtained a registration number without ever becoming a citizen—is the kind of fraud that audits would catch.

Federal law makes it a crime for a noncitizen to register or vote in a federal election. California requires a citizenship attestation but does not require documentary proof of citizenship at registration. Essayli has called the resulting system a “fraudster’s paradise” and said California has “basically” decriminalized many of the safeguards other states use. The state maintains that noncitizen voting is rare, that it complies with federal law, and that privacy statutes bar the unredacted dump the department wants. 

Rivera also had a recent run-in with immigration enforcement while attending an Anti-ICE rally.  In February he was cited for disrupting operations at the federal building in Camarillo, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and received probation. Prosecutors say he later texted a federal agent that he could not wait until the midterms, stating, “Your not the good guy I can’t wait until the mid terms you dont have qualified immunity then we can start and indict all you guys one bye one.” The texting continued until July 2026.

Essayli vows that more arrests are coming..