The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged an illegal immigrant from Guatemala for illegally voting in American elections and stealing the identity of an American citizen.
The Justice Department brought the charges against Angelica Maria Francisco, a 42-year old Guatemalan national illegally residing in Alabama, after it was found that she illegally voted in both the 2016 and 2020 primary and general elections despite not being an American citizen.
The DOJ stated in a press release that Francisco was charged with “false claims of citizenship in connection with voting, false statements in application for a United States passport, use of a United States passport obtained by false statements, and aggravated identity theft.” Francisco has agreed to plead guilty to all charges.
The plea agreement reveals that the Guatemalan national illegally assumed the identity of an American citizen in about 2011 before using that identity to illegally procure a passport and register to vote.
“She subsequently used the United States passport to travel to and from her native country of Guatemala in 2012, 2015, and 2018,” the DOJ explained. “Using the same false identity, Francisco also registered to vote in Alabama in 2016 and voted in the 2016 and 2020 primary and general elections.”
The charge from the DOJ comes as Republicans in the House and Senate are attempting to pass the SAVE Act, a piece of legislation that intends to further safeguard federal elections against illegal immigrant voting. Democrats like Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, however, have claimed that the problem of illegal immigrant voting “doesn’t exist” and that the act is unnecessary.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently warned that mass illegal immigration could mean that “Democrats win every election forever,” also accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and others in her party of leveraging illegal immigration “to fundamentally shift the policies of the United States of America and to move them dramatically to the left.”
Fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants, or a mass amnesty that allows those illegally in the country to become citizens and vote in our elections, could disproportionately affect some swing states. All 15 counties in Arizona, for example, were just named in a lawsuit from America First Legal, which claimed that they failed to remove illegal immigrants from the voter rolls. Arizona, which is worth 11 electoral college votes, is a crucial swing state that could determine the fate of the 2024 presidential election.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has warned that even illegal immigrants who do not themselves vote could shift the balance of power in Congress in favor of the Democrats simply by being present in the country. The census does not account for citizenship status, meaning that the population figures that determine Congressional apportionment could result in the creation of additional Congressional districts in heavily Democratic areas.
The concerns that illegal immigration could influence our elections come as the Biden-Harris administration has presided over an unprecedented spike in illegal immigration. More than 10 million people have crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration, with an estimated 1.7 million illegal immigrant gotaways recorded since Biden was inaugurated in 2021. There were 415,000 total reported gotaways for 2018, 2019, and 2020 during the Trump administration.
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