Federal prosecutors have charged three non-U.S. citizens in Middle Tennessee with voting illegally in the 2024 federal election and falsely claiming to be American citizens on their state voter-registration paperwork. Garfield St. Vincent Bruce, 48, a citizen of Jamaica; Mariela Elizabeth Avila Ortiz, 33, a citizen of Honduras; and Allison Melissa Wilkes, 49, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, are each accused of casting ballots in an election that included races for president, vice president, U.S. Senate and U.S. House.
According to WSMV, prosecutors allege all three falsely and willfully represented themselves as U.S. citizens on Tennessee voter-registration applications in 2024, using those applications to register or vote in federal, state or local elections. The station reports that the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations handled the inquiry, with assistance from the Tennessee Secretary of State's Office.
U.S. Attorney Braden H. Boucek said the prosecutions are meant to protect election integrity, per the same report, while Assistant U.S. Attorney F. Dalton Thompson III is prosecuting the cases. Federal law, specifically 18 U.S.C. § 611, makes it unlawful for a noncitizen to vote in an election held even in part to choose a president, vice president, presidential elector, senator or House member, subject to an exception spelled out in the statute itself.
Charges Land as Tennessee Heads Into Another Election Season
The charges arrive as Tennessee moves through its 2026 general election season, the WSMV report notes. That timing follows a broader effort by the Tennessee Secretary of State's Office, which previously referred 42 potential non-U.S. citizens to the FBI for investigation of possible illegal voting, according to the Tennessee Lookout. Those 42 potential voters represented just 0.0001% of the state's roughly 4.3 million registered voters, the outlet reported.
Part of a Sharp National Increase in Prosecutions
The Middle Tennessee case fits into a much larger national pattern. Since 2025, the Trump administration has charged 131 people federally with illegally registering or voting as noncitizens, according to a review of federal court records by The New York Times. That compares with 13 people charged with noncitizen voting during the Biden administration, the same review found.
As of mid-October, 10 people nationally had pleaded guilty or been convicted in cases tied to alleged noncitizen voting in the 2024 general election, while one person in Florida was acquitted, the Times reported. The paper also found that federal and state charges for noncitizen voting have not exceeded 25 people in any single state in a recent election, and the Heritage Foundation has identified 71 criminal convictions nationwide for noncitizen voting between 2000 and 2025.
Other states have seen similar investigations unravel or shrink under scrutiny. In Iowa, officials initially flagged 2,176 suspected noncitizens on voter rolls in 2024 before revising that number down to 277 after cross-checking it against a federal database, with only one of 11 charged noncitizens facing active charges tied to the 2024 general election, per the Times. In Nevada, election officials said all 185 people on a list sent by the Department of Homeland Security were in fact citizens, after the agency had initially claimed to have found nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered to vote in the state.
