Two Indian nationals are among 28 green card holders charged with election fraud in California, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, in a sweeping action tied to a federal push to safeguard the integrity of American elections.
According to the Justice Department, Amandeep Kaur, 30, and Kamlesh Shah, 67, have been charged with fraudulently registering as voters and casting ballots in the November 2024 US elections. Of the 28 people charged, 11 were arrested in early-morning raids across the state as part of ‘Operation Protect the Vote’, an initiative aimed at rooting out election fraud. It was not immediately clear whether the two Indian nationals were among those arrested.
Shah, a resident of Sacramento, fraudulently registered to vote on the day of the November 2024 general election and cast his ballot the same day, officials said. Kaur, who lives in Rancho Palos Verdes and is seeking to become a US citizen, fraudulently registered in December 2022 and voted in the November 2024 election.
The Justice Department clarified that all 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents, commonly known as green card holders. “Although LPRs have legal immigration status in the United States, they are not US citizens and are not permitted to vote in US elections,” the department said in its statement.
The criminal charges include making false statements in a naturalisation application, while some defendants also face counts of fraudulent voter registration. Both are felonies carrying a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.
“Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told reporters in Los Angeles.
The announcement builds on a broader enforcement push by the Justice Department this year. Before Monday’s charges, the department had brought cases against roughly 90 people for various types of election misconduct in 2025, including 50 alleged to have voted as noncitizens.
For context, the scale of the alleged fraud is small relative to the electorate: more than 227 million voters were registered in the United States during the 2024 presidential election. Still, officials have framed the operation as a signal of their commitment to upholding electoral integrity, with the prosecutions marking one of the most concentrated federal actions against noncitizen voting in recent years.
Original Source: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/2-indians-among-28-green-card-holders-charged-with-election-fraud-in-us-12208671#publisher=newsstand
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Publish Date: 2026-10-20 04:21:00
