On July 7, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia warning of criminal prosecution. “Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state's [state voter registration list] or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability,” she wrote in letters reviewed by CBS News, giving each state five days to explain how it will comply. A department spokesperson said the letters asked for “voluntary compliance in a timely manner.” Votebeat noted that they were unlikely to have an immediate practical effect, since every state already has procedures to prevent noncitizen voting, and that several states received them at generic public email addresses. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his state would keep following Arizona law, “not directions that come from political rhetoric or intimidation.”
In September the department sent litigation-hold letters to the 29 states and the District of Columbia it is suing for voter data, ordering them to preserve 2024 election records and warning that “failure to preserve relevant data may constitute spoliation of evidence,” which could bring “civil and criminal sanctions,” the AP reported. The letter to Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, told her she is “under investigation” and subject to ongoing litigation over her refusal to hand over the unredacted voter list. The department declined to say what the investigation covers. Dhillon called the letters “standard litigation practice” and said they were not a threat. Henderson said: “No letter — and we've gotten a lot of letters from the Department of Justice over the past year — not a single one of them said that we were under investigation for anything.”
No official has been charged. Instances of noncitizen voting are extremely rare, CBS noted (see Trump's DOJ Is Now 0-for-26 on Voter Roll Lawsuits, Losing Every Resolved Case for Access to States' Voter Rolls).
Update (October 19, 2026): Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, told 60 Minutes the Justice Department had told her she is under investigation. “In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor the threats were all external. Non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things. But now we also have threats coming from within our own government,” she said, and the department wanted “social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver's license numbers.” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told the program, “It's not to sow distrust. The distrust is there.”