Seven foreign nationals are now facing federal charges for voting in Texas elections, and the list of where they came from reads like four continents. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the arrests on September 15 after a joint investigation with the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. Six were indicted; one was charged by criminal complaint. All seven cases are in Tarrant County.
Where This Stands Right Now
- Seven noncitizens were arrested or charged September 15 for voting illegally, six of them in the 2024 general election.
- Three are Mexican citizens, two are Nigerian nationals, one is an Indian citizen and one is a national of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- One of the seven, Joshua Nmelichukwu Akpom, is charged over a vote cast back in 2018, plus false statements during his naturalization.
- On the same day, Texas ordered county registrars to reinstate 578 voters the state had wrongly flagged as noncitizens.
Who Was Charged
The defendants are Carlos Salas Barrios (Mexico), Joshua Nmelichukwu Akpom (Nigeria), Helen Mayen Adams (Nigeria), Khalwinder Singh Bhengura (India), Moises Anwar Arellano-Alba (Mexico), Celestin Kuasa Katubadi (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Rocio Thrasher (Mexico). Five face two federal counts each: voting by an alien and making a false statement of citizenship in order to register. Salas Barrios is charged with voting by an alien alone. Akpom is charged with false statements in relation to naturalization, tied to a ballot cast in the 2018 general election.
Two of the ballots never counted. The Texas Tribune reported that Salas Barrios’s 2024 ballot was rejected, and Katubadi cast a provisional ballot that was also thrown out. The other five votes appear to have gone through. Paxton’s office did not say how the seven were identified, only that the cases came out of a joint state-federal probe. “Foreign influence has no place in American elections,” Paxton said, promising investigators would “ensure that Texas has free and fair elections.”
The Political Consequence
For Republicans, the arrests are the proof they have been waiting for. Since 2023, illegal voting in Texas has been a second-degree felony, and the state has spent the past year running its rolls against the federal SAVE citizenship database. Paxton, who is in the middle of a Senate campaign, has made noncitizen voting a signature issue, and a federal grand jury handing up indictments gives him something more than a press release: named defendants, real passports, and a case that Democrats cannot wave away as a hypothetical.
The other side of the ledger landed the same afternoon. Of the 2,724 registered voters Texas first flagged as possible noncitizens, the state has now confirmed that 578 are U.S. citizens, and 506 of those were flagged only because their passport data had not reached the SAVE database when the state ran its check. The Secretary of State told county registrars Tuesday to put all 578 back on the rolls. Another 117 cases remain referred to Paxton’s office for investigation. That mismatch, seven charged versus 578 wrongly flagged, is the number Democrats will use, and it is already the subject of a federal lawsuit filed in March.
What Happens Next
The seven cases move through federal court in Fort Worth; no trial dates have been set. Voting by an alien and false claims of citizenship each carry potential prison time and, for noncitizens, removal from the country after any sentence. Watch the 117 open referrals, which could produce a second round of charges before the midterms, and watch whether the reinstated 578 become a campaign issue of their own. Texas has more than 18 million registered voters and more than 11 million cast ballots in 2024; seven charges is a rounding error by count, but it is the first batch of federal noncitizen-voting indictments in the state since the SAVE review began, and it will not be the last.
NEW: Texas AG @KenPaxtonTX announces the arrests of seven noncitizens indicted on federal charges related to the 2024 general election.
Paxton’s office says the cases stem from its investigations and were brought in coordination with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern…
— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) September 15, 2026
Sources:
texasattorneygeneral.gov, texastribune.org, redstate.com
