Harmeet Dhillon is putting election officials on notice.

The Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights is now directly in the election-integrity fight, and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is right in the middle of it.

Dhillon’s message is simple: knowingly encouraging noncitizens to vote or conspiring to fraudulently register noncitizens is a federal crime.

This is the kind of federal backbone election integrity supporters have wanted for years, and it is happening under President Trump’s Justice Department.

Bridge Michigan, republishing Votebeat, reported that the Justice Department sent letters to election officials in several states warning that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly leave noncitizens on voter rolls or allow noncitizens to receive, cast, or have ballots counted in federal elections.

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The report said a July 7 letter to Benson was signed by Dhillon and gave Michigan five days to explain how it will ensure compliance with federal law at both the state and local levels.

Bridge/Votebeat also reported that at least 13 other states received identical language, including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The memo attached to the letter pointed election officials to obligations under federal election laws including the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, and Help America Vote Act.

The demand is simple. Show the safeguards, show the work, and show that ineligible voters are not being carried on the rolls.

The warning landed fast with conservatives who have been demanding real consequences for sloppy voter rolls.

A Justice Department OLC opinion from May 12, 2026 gives the administration’s legal backdrop for this push.

The opinion says the Civil Rights Division has authority to seek statewide voter registration lists and share them with the Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to identify people who are ineligible to vote.

It also ties the effort to President Trump’s directive for the Attorney General to prioritize enforcement of laws restricting noncitizens from registering to vote or voting, and to take action against states that fail to comply with voter-list maintenance requirements.

That is why the five-day clock matters. The practical difference is important: the demand comes with a deadline and sits on top of a legal theory the Trump DOJ has already put in writing.

Another post laid out the practical pressure point: states now have a deadline.

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Michigan Democrats are not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office published a response with Benson to separate DOJ municipal letters ahead of the August 2026 primary.

The state said DOJ letters to Detroit, East Lansing, and Lansing requested documents and outlined plans to deploy federal election monitors. Nessel and Benson argued that the allegations behind those monitor letters were baseless and unsubstantiated.

The same statement said federal monitors are routine observers and must follow local, county, and state law. It also said those programs do not give DOJ authority to interfere with state or local election administration or demand hands-on access to voting equipment.

That response shows why Benson is now such a central figure in the fight. Michigan officials are trying to frame DOJ oversight as intimidation, while Dhillon is framing the same pressure as basic federal enforcement of citizen-only voting rules.

Axios Detroit reported that DOJ intends to monitor the Aug. 4 primary in Detroit, Lansing, and East Lansing.

A DOJ spokesperson told Axios those jurisdictions have received Civil Rights Division monitors in past elections under previous administrations as well. Benson, meanwhile, said she welcomes lawful observers but accused President Trump and DOJ of pursuing baseless allegations to confuse voters.

The monitor issue also gives the public a concrete place to watch this battle unfold. Detroit, Lansing, and East Lansing are now part of the same broader election-integrity pressure campaign that started with voter-roll demands and is continuing through compliance letters.

That is the fight in one sentence: Dhillon says election officials are on notice, while Benson says Michigan’s system is already secure.

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If Michigan’s rolls are clean, the answer should be easy.

American citizens decide American elections. Dhillon is now forcing state officials to prove they understand that.

Glenn Beck had more here with Harmeet on his show:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Glenn: Welcome to the program, Harmeet Dhillon. How are you, Harmeet?

Harmeet Dhillon: I’m great. Always happy to be with you.

Glenn: So, this is not going to be popular in Michigan. Can you tell us what you’re planning on doing, what the DOJ is doing now, and why?

Harmeet Dhillon: Well, I’m going to push back a little bit. It’s actually really popular with a lot of people in Michigan, including many legislators who reached out and specifically asked us to do this because Michigan, like some other battleground states, has been rife with irregularities in recent election cycles. Both Republicans and Democrats have sent election monitors in the past to all these battleground states.

And so some of the issues that we’re going to look for in four jurisdictions where we’re sending these election monitors—Detroit, East Lansing, Lansing, and Hamtramck—include, and I may have mispronounced that last one, include language issues. There has been no assessment by the DOJ in two of these jurisdictions that have high Hispanic populations as to whether they’re complying with federal law relating to ballot access.

There have been extremely long lines in the recent election in one of these jurisdictions that has a university campus, in Detroit, I believe. And there’s an admitted glitch in the poll book loading in the other one. So these are all based on actual irregularities that we’ve seen in prior elections. Now, when you look at how the Biden administration handled some of these hotspots, and I’m just talking about the primary, not the general.

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We’re going to have a vastly expanded program in the general election. In prior election cycles in 2022, the person sitting in this chair in the Biden DOJ sent nine election monitors in 2022 and sent 27 in 2024. So this is not unusual. This is something DOJ does regularly. People are just upset that Republicans are taking the integrity of our elections seriously at the DOJ level for a change. That is new, and they better get used to it.

Glenn: Good. The news broke overnight that the DOJ is sending letters warning election officials, I’m quoting, “in all 50 states and the District of Columbia they will face criminal prosecution over non-citizen voting.” The letters signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon give states 5 days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain clean voter lists. Non-citizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Harmeet Dhillon: Well, so first of all, the word left out when that hysterical commentary from the left is “knowingly.” So, if a state election official knowingly refuses to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls, that’s illegal. That is a crime under our laws. And someone who does that and conspires to do that can be prosecuted. So I’m simply informing top election officials around the country, and it includes Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, that this is their duty.

Now, a third of the states have voluntarily complied with us, and we thank them for their cooperation, and in that effort, we have found hundreds of thousands of dead people on voter rolls and we have found tens of thousands of names of suspected non-citizens that we are now digging into through our immigration files to see whether they are appropriately on the rolls or not. In recent weeks, months, and even the last year and a half, we prosecuted numerous people at the Department of Justice for voting while not citizens of the United States.

And it’s indisputable based on evidence that I’ve seen that there are tens of thousands of non-citizens at a minimum on the voter rolls in just the ones that we’ve examined. And keep in mind, two-thirds of the states are fighting us in getting access to their up-to-date voter rolls, but we’re using, you know, other means to look at some of these. And so I think that’s very concerning, Glenn. Your vote and my vote is very important and precious to us.

And even if one or two people are canceling out our votes, that’s a problem for me, that’s a problem for you as a citizen, and it’s a problem for the United States. So I think it’s very important that people know this. And the other thing is what we’ve learned is that many legal residents of the United States, green card holders for example, are not aware that they’re not entitled to vote in our elections. So, you know, this is educational as well. It’s the duty of the states to not register those people and to inform them.

And they’re not doing that. I can tell you as a 25-year California resident, you just check a box to say you’re a citizen. What if you don’t speak English that well or you don’t understand the distinction between citizenship and that green card you have, which is a legal status? You’d be checking that box and indeed thousands of people do that and then they vote and then they’re making themselves criminals and also subject to deportation. We don’t want that for law-abiding people.

So, I think this is simply good hygiene of our voter rolls. And I think it is unfortunately necessary that we remind people of their duties. I know they’re clutching their pearls. They’re really upset, but if they’re following the law, they have nothing to worry about.

Glenn: You did this during the 2024 election. I mean, you had monitors everywhere. You personally were overseeing a lot of it. And I think that’s one of the reasons why we had such a clean roll in some places. What did you learn from that and how is this different at all?

Harmeet Dhillon: So for the election, what’s different here is, in the prior times I’ve done it, I’ve certainly done it for decades. I’ve been a Republican election monitor and lawyer over the years. Then in November 2024, I was in charge of the Arizona operation and we had dozens of volunteers there. The Democrats had their own operation, their own war room, and dozens and maybe hundreds of volunteers on their side.

And so we send our credentialed, in the case of a political party, you send a credentialed person. There’s a process. You get to look at what’s going on there. And in Arizona’s case, for example, there were indeed irregularities and there were misprints and there was the wrong-sized paper in 2022 and thousands of people were turned away from the ballots in Maricopa County. There were problems in Apache County.

So that’s one of the reasons why we’re sending federal election monitors to Apache County this time around. Native Americans were not allowed to vote because it was just complete incompetence on the part of county officials at that time. And so, what’s different about the DOJ is we have a right to do this under federal law. So, we don’t have to ask for permission. We’re going to go in and we’re going to observe just like, by the way, decades of lawyers at the Civil Rights Division have done in both Republican and Democrat administrations.

And no one squawked about it the way that they are today. And it’s a good thing when the federal government is there to ensure that the law is enforced. I think it makes everyone feel more confident. And you know, while we’re just doing it for six states and nine jurisdictions in the upcoming primaries—most of the primaries have already occurred—you can look for a much more expanded presence on the ground of federal election monitors in the 2026 election because I want every citizen who votes on both sides to feel confident in the outcome of those elections.

Now, monitors alone are not going to help us do that. There’s no federal monitor that’s going to fix California’s wacky ways and delays in how they count votes, which is worse than almost every third-world country. But at a minimum, we can ensure that there are eyes and ears there from the feds and we can then take action swiftly and step in. Now this is not a substitute for private election monitoring. The parties are going to do that.

I know that there are going to be congressional monitors going from, I assume, both parties, and this is our sacred right and duty. It’s part of the First Amendment to be able to observe what’s happening as we cast our votes and ballots. And that was frustrating in 2020 as you know, again, I was a lawyer who was with the campaigns at that time and our colleagues were prevented from witnessing exactly what was going on in Detroit, one of the places I’m sending election monitors in the upcoming weeks, and in Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically.

And so, people don’t know whether they can trust the outcomes of those elections when there’s cardboard taped over the counting areas, when there’s mysterious incidents and occurrences that nobody bothers to explain, when people are taking thumb drives and moving them around and there’s no valid explanation and witness to that. So, I want to put a stop to all that chatter on both sides by having a very transparent process.

Glenn: So, I talked to the first assistant US attorney in, I think, central California, and he was talking to us about doing an investigation and saying, “Hey, we’re just looking for any evidence and if anybody has anything, they want to come forward and tell us about it.” And he wasn’t saying that there was corruption at the time. Have we found—do we have any updates on California? Have you found anything? Does it look clean? What’s the story there?

Harmeet Dhillon: I think you’re referring to my dear friend and colleague, Billy, who’s running the Los Angeles office and investigations, and I’m not able to comment on what has been found at this time. We don’t comment on the fruits of ongoing investigations, but I can promise you that whatever has been found so far isn’t the end of it. And so absolutely people should come forward if they’ve witnessed something.

For example, just in Los Angeles, I was with Bill just a few weeks ago where we announced the indictment and later guilty plea of a woman who signed up untold dozens or hundreds—I’m sure hundreds actually—of homeless people on Skid Row illegally. Illegally because, not that they’re not entitled to vote, but she paid them to register to vote. That’s illegal. She paid them for signatures on signature petitions. That’s illegal. And she gave them her former home address to use as their voter registration address.

All illegal, illegal, illegal. We caught this one woman doing it thanks to independent journalists. And I’m sure that this is a much bigger problem. So, we’d like to catch all of that fraud and we’d like to put a stop to it wherever it’s occurring in the United States. By the way, whether it’s being done by anybody of any party, it is intolerable and it needs to stop.

Glenn: Right. And how bad is the punishment?

Harmeet Dhillon: We’ll see. Sentencing hasn’t occurred in that case. She is pleading guilty. So I think we’ll see. But, you know, I think it all depends on how many predicate acts you can prove and how long it’s been going on, who else is involved. People don’t do this in a vacuum. There’s money to be made. There’s big money in states like California that have signature petitions. Michigan is another one.

There’s big money to be had in circulating these petitions and there’s fraud in petition circulation, and it occurs at the highest level and at the lowest level. And so catching the people who are shelling out the money would be the big prize here, and so we’re definitely looking to follow those threads.

Glenn: Always good to have you on. Thank you so much. God bless you.

Harmeet Dhillon: Thank you, Glenn. Keep up the good work.

Glenn: You bet. Bye-bye. Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s assistant attorney general. She is on top of civil rights.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

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