A Mexican national living in Midland was charged with illegally voting in a federal election.
Federal authorities say Imelda Magallanes, 51, was granted Lawful Permanent Resident status in December 2010 and renewed her LPR card in 2023.
Voting records from the Midland County Elections Office indicate that Magallanes registered to vote in October 2020, using her Texas driver’s license as identification.
The records also reveal that Magallanes voted in the November 2024 General Election, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas.
Magallanes is charged with one count of voting by an alien in a federal election. If convicted, she faces up to one year in federal prison and a $100,000 fine.
Illegal voting by a non-U.S. citizen is a deportable offense.
Several other foreign nationals living in Texas have recently been charged with violating federal voting laws.
In May, Samuel James Hall, a 50-year-old citizen of the United Kingdom legally living in Houston, admitted to illegally voting in the 2024 federal election.
Another U.K. citizen, 63-year-old Ada Ngozi Otuka, who was lawfully residing in Katy, pleaded guilty in August to illegally voting in the 2020 election and falsely claiming U.S. citizenship on state voter registration forms. Federal prosecutors said she cast ballots in 2012, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024.
Earlier this month, seven foreign nationals were arrested in North Texas on charges of unlawfully voting in federal elections and/or falsely claiming U.S. citizenship.
One was an illegal alien from Mexico who allegedly falsely claimed U.S. citizenship when applying for a Texas driver’s license in 2023 and voted in the 2024 General Election in Dallas County.
The other six were lawful permanent residents from Mexico, Nigeria, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Five were charged with illegally voting in the 2024 General Election. A sixth was charged with making false statements on his naturalization application after voting in the 2018 federal election.
“Federal elections belong to American citizens—period,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould.
Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden referred an additional 117 cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General’s office on September 15.
Those cases stem from a statewide review of voters’ citizenship that began last year, when the secretary of state’s office ran more than 18 million registered voters through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
That initial review identified 2,724 registered voters as potential noncitizens and sent their registrations to county election officials for further investigation.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s order blocking implementation of a modified SAVE program headed by the Department of Homeland Security. The League of Women Voters opposed the election integrity measure.
The Court’s September 25 ruling allows the Trump administration to resume its expanded voter citizenship verification program, which lets states use Social Security records to check voters’ citizenship. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.
“Yes, you read that right,” DHS General Counsel James Percival posted to X. “We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting.”
“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a win for the integrity of our elections and the democratic process,” said Attorney General Ken Paxton. “Texas must continue to be able to utilize resources that help us keep our elections fair and secure in order to protect the voice of the American people.”
In other Texas voter registration news, county election officials received word last week from the secretary of state’s office that an unspecified number of registration records originating with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s online transactions were “incomplete,” resulting in the files not being transmitted to counties for review.
In a September 22 email, Director of Elections Christina Adkins stated that the SOS had worked with DPS to resolve the problem and identify the affected records. The backlogged records have been forwarded to the counties to process.
October 5 is the deadline for Texans to register to vote in the November 3, 2026 General Election.
