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The U.S. Department of Justice has charged four additional noncitizens with crimes related to registering to vote and voting in the 2022 or 2024 elections in Pennsylvania.
The charges come amid a nationwide crackdown by President Donald Trump’s administration on alleged noncitizen voters just weeks before the midterm elections.
“Our sovereignty as a nation belongs to the American people and no one else,” David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said in a press release Thursday evening. “Anyone, including illegal aliens, who votes illegally in our elections will be prosecuted for corrupting our democracy.”
Three of the four defendants reside in Philadelphia. Sade Guppy, 37, and Eduardo Gallardo Maldonado, 66, were charged with voting in the November 2022 and November 2024 elections, respectively. Cliff Sanon, 39, is charged with one count of submitting a fraudulent voter registration application in 2026, but the department alleges that he also voted in November 2022.
The fourth person accused is Dilea Ochoa-Perez, 43, a resident of Coatesville in Chester County. She is charged with voting in the November 2022 and November 2024 elections.
Attempts to contact the four defendants were unsuccessful.
It is the second time this month that the Justice Department has charged Pennsylvania residents with crimes related to noncitizen voting.
On Sept. 4, the department announced that a U.S. citizen and his noncitizen wife, both from Carlisle, had been charged with crimes related to registering and voting in the November 2024 election. In a separate case, a Harrisburg resident was charged with crimes related to voting in that same election.
The Trump administration has been stepping up its prosecution of illegal voting across the country in recent weeks. Last month, CNN reported that the Department of Homeland Security was planning to launch a surge of voter fraud investigations.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter recently said that the Department of Justice has charged 70 people with voting fraud so far this year, compared with 13 in four years under former President Joe Biden. However, there is nothing to suggest the cases are related or that the fraud is happening on any coordinated scale.
The push comes as the Department of Homeland Security claims there are thousands of potential noncitizens on state voter rolls.
In July, the department claimed it had identified 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in four states, including 14,576 in Pennsylvania.
Last week, Votebeat and Spotlight PA obtained an email from the department to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt in which the department laid out its methodology for identifying those potential noncitizens registered to vote and offered to provide the full list to the state.
As of Friday, Pennsylvania had not yet responded to the email or offer and had not received the list.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.