Federal agents arrested a Bahamian green card holder in Georgia who allegedly cast an illegal ballot in the 2020 election, a man whose rap sheet includes armed robbery, domestic violence, and assaulting a police officer.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Homeland Security Investigations agents in Atlanta took Anthony Tyrone Higgs into custody on September 3 in Decatur, Georgia, after an HSI investigation confirmed the previous month that Higgs had voted in the 2020 election despite holding no U.S. citizenship. Higgs, who entered the country as a lawful permanent resident in October 1976, now faces removal proceedings that could strip his green card and end a five-decade stay in the United States, the Daily Caller reported.

The arrest is the latest in a string of enforcement actions by the Department of Homeland Security targeting noncitizens who cast ballots in American elections, a campaign that has picked up speed since DHS directed ICE in June to pursue deportation as a penalty for illegal voting.

Eight charges, one illegal ballot, and fifty years of residency on the line

Higgs' criminal record is long and violent. He has been convicted on two counts of grand larceny, one count of armed robbery with a deadly weapon, two counts of possessing a weapon during a violent crime, assault on a police officer, criminal domestic violence, and resisting arrest.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not hold back in a written statement provided to the Daily Caller:

"This criminal alien from the Bahamas has a rap sheet for multiple violent crimes, including armed robbery, domestic violence, and assault on a police officer. On top of all of that, he illegally voted in the 2020 election. If even one non-citizen votes in our elections, it cancels out the vote of an American citizen. Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of ICE, this criminal will be removed from our country and can never interfere in our elections again."

Higgs remains in ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations custody. DHS has initiated proceedings to revoke his lawful permanent resident status based on his criminal convictions, a step that would make deportation to the Bahamas the next move.

What remains unclear is whether Higgs faces separate criminal charges specifically tied to the illegal vote. The documents obtained by the Daily Caller detail his arrest and criminal history but do not specify federal voting-fraud charges of the kind filed against other noncitizens caught in similar enforcement sweeps.

Peruvian national charged days earlier in Kansas voting case

Higgs' arrest came just two days after federal agents picked up another noncitizen on voting-related charges. On September 1, ICE and HSI officers arrested Mariana Alexandra Dewey, a Peruvian national, for allegedly misrepresenting herself as a U.S. citizen while casting a ballot in the 2024 general election in Kansas.

Dewey faces four federal counts: one for a false claim of citizenship, one for a false claim of U.S. citizenship in order to vote, one for fraudulent election conduct, and one for voting by an alien in a federal election. Those charges lay out the full legal toolkit the government is now deploying against noncitizen voters, charges that carry serious prison time and virtually guarantee deportation.

The back-to-back arrests reflect an ICE enforcement tempo that has set arrest records in recent months, with agents operating at a pace not seen in years.

DHS built the enforcement pipeline over the summer

The Higgs and Dewey cases did not happen in a vacuum. DHS laid the groundwork in a series of moves that began in early June. On June 9, the department formally directed ICE to enforce stricter penalties against noncitizens who vote in American elections, making deportation a standard consequence rather than an afterthought.

Five weeks later, on July 17, Secretary Mullin sent letters to secretaries of state in several states warning about noncitizens who had been found on voter rolls. The specific states that received those letters have not been publicly identified, but the message was blunt: state election officials needed to clean their rolls.

Also in July, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that its grant recipients would be required to take certain actions related to election security, a move that extended the administration's election-integrity push into the federal funding pipeline. The precise requirements FEMA imposed have not been detailed publicly.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis framed the enforcement posture in stark terms. Fox News reported her statement:

"Any noncitizens who vote illegally in our elections will be arrested and removed. American elections are only for Americans."

That warning now carries operational weight. The cases of Higgs and Dewey show that DHS is not simply issuing press releases, agents are knocking on doors, and prosecutors are filing charges.

A broader pattern of noncitizen voting cases across multiple states

Higgs and Dewey are not isolated examples. Fox News reported that noncitizens from Colombia, Slovakia, Australia, and Mauritania have also been charged or sentenced for casting illegal ballots in recent U.S. elections. The geographic and national diversity of the defendants undercuts any suggestion that noncitizen voting is limited to a single border state or a single nationality.

The enforcement surge comes as ICE arrests have surged month over month, with agents operating across the country in street-level operations that have expanded well beyond traditional border enforcement.

For years, critics on the left dismissed concerns about noncitizen voting as exaggerated or conspiratorial. The standard line was that the numbers were negligible, too small to matter, too rare to justify new enforcement tools. Each new arrest chips away at that argument. When a green card holder with a record of armed robbery and domestic violence manages to cast a ballot in a presidential election and goes undetected for six years, the system did not work. It failed.

That failure is not abstract. Every illegal ballot cast by a noncitizen cancels the lawful vote of an American citizen, a point Mullin made explicitly and one that does not require partisan framing to land. It is a matter of basic arithmetic and basic fairness.

The administration's approach has not been without friction. A Biden-appointed federal judge recently vacated an ICE courthouse arrest policy, calling the enforcement rationale hollow, one of several judicial challenges that have tested the legal boundaries of the current immigration crackdown.

And the resistance extends beyond the bench. A former Wisconsin judge received only a $5,000 fine and no prison time for obstructing an ICE arrest, a sentence that sent its own message about how seriously some corners of the legal system take immigration enforcement.

Open questions hang over the Higgs case

Several facts remain unresolved. The jurisdiction where Higgs accumulated his criminal convictions, whether Georgia, another state, or the Bahamas, has not been specified. It is also unclear how Higgs registered to vote in the first place, or what safeguards failed to flag a noncitizen on the rolls before the 2020 election.

HSI Atlanta confirmed the illegal vote in August 2026, but the precise date of that confirmation and the investigative trail that led to it have not been disclosed. Nor has DHS revealed whether a removal date has been set or whether Higgs will contest the proceedings.

Those gaps matter. If the system cannot explain how a man with a violent criminal history and no citizenship managed to vote in a presidential election, and then went undetected for six years, the fix requires more than one arrest. It requires an answer.

The administration is clearly willing to make arrests. The harder question is whether state election officials are willing to do the unglamorous work of scrubbing their voter rolls before the next ballot is cast, not after.