This story is part of ABC News’ monthly “Protecting Your Vote” series, which profiles people across the country who are dedicated to ensuring the integrity of the voting process.
Cecilia Castellano woke up to the sound of her doorbell in the early hours of August 20th. The south Texas sky outside her Atascosa County home was still dark, but as she left her bedroom, her hair in curls, she slipped into a robe. shoulders — a clear cut across his portal.
On the other side of his door two voices announced themselves: “Police Department.”
“I came forward and I actually looked out the window … and they were shining a flashlight at my window,” Castellano recalled in an interview with ABC News’ Mireya Villarreal. “They said, ‘Ma’am, we have a search warrant.’ I said: ‘what is the search warrant for?’ And they say, ‘Well, can we come in?'”
Officers gave Castellano a warrant, then confiscated his phone and asked him to enter his PIN, he said.
were looking for evidence The so-called “ballot packing,” an opaque provision of the 2021 voter integrity bill championed by the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and enforced by controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Both men describe the law, known as SB 1, as a protection against non-citizen voting — a rare occurrence already prohibited by state and federal law. But Castellano, a Democratic candidate for a seat in the Texas State House, calls it fear of voters.
FILE – An election official checks a voter’s photo ID at an early voting site in Austin, Texas, February 26, 2014. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Eric Gay/AP
“Everything I’ve done — everything my team has done — has gone and knocked on doors,” Castellano said. “That’s why they caught me. And to this day, from being scared, to being angry, to (thinking) that my civil rights have been violated — they’ve really tried to intimidate me.”
A third-generation Mexican-American, Castellano — a grandmother and business owner — launched her long-running bid for public office with little hope of gaining mainstream attention. But after Aug. 20, his campaign has emerged as the focal point of the national debate over noncitizen voting.
Castellano was among several prominent Latinos in Texas who were targeted over the Paxton vote-rigging investigation, which he said was prompted by “sufficient evidence” of election fraud. A county prosecutor outside San Antonio referred allegations of “election fraud and vote-rigging” to the attorney general’s office in 2022, according to Paxton’s statement in August.
No charges have been filed in the case.
“Why do they come to Latino-dominated areas?” Villarreal asked Castellano.
“Because they are trying to scare the Latinos,” replied Castellano.
The Republicans, under the leadership of the former president Donald Trumpthey have claimed without evidence that undocumented immigrants could tip the balance in favor of the Democrats this November, and have increasingly promoted the debunked narrative in front of voters in the months leading up to Election Day.
“Our election is bad,” Trump said ABC News presidential debate in September “And a lot of these illegal immigrants that come in are trying to get them to vote. They can’t speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in, and they’re trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come to our country.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, recently tried without success to pass legislation that would require voters to prove their U.S. citizenship through documentation — instead of verifying it under penalty of perjury as current laws require — arguing in May, “We all know, intuitively, that there are a lot of illegals who are voting in federal elections.”
But critics and election experts say that’s not true, and accuse Trump and his allies of creating baseless and dishonest claims of noncitizen voting in an effort to make it harder for prospective voters to register and vote. The libertarian Cato Institute called allegations of widespread non-citizen voting “alarming theorizing,” and Pennsylvania’s Republican election leader recently acknowledged that he “found that very, very, very rarely happened.”
The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, found that less than 0.0001 percent of the votes cast in the 2016 election were noncitizens.
“The non-citizen vote is a rare disappearing phenomenon,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center. “It is a crime for a non-citizen to register to vote or vote in state and federal elections. Consequences include jail time, heavy fines and even deportation.”
“It’s terrible to think that someone trying to bring themselves and their family to the United States and build a life here would risk all of that — risk their freedom and their presence in the United States.” — casting a vote in an election,” he said.
Still, leaders in a handful of GOP-led states have used the threat of large-scale noncitizen voting to justify massive purges from voter rolls, including Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio and Texas — places Governor Abbott has touted. removing more than a million names from the rolls since 2021, when SB 1 was passed.
In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin said he removed more than 6,000 suspected noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, but a Washington Post investigation did not find a single instance of noncitizen voting during his tenure. And on Friday, the Justice Department sued Virginia for violating federal rules that prohibit states from removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election. Youngkin called the lawsuit a “politically motivated act” to “interfere in our elections.”
While the national debate over non-citizen voting rages, Castellano has vowed to continue his campaign. On the evening of their recent door-knocking in Jourdanton, Texas, where a group of reporters followed, two police cruisers approached Castellano.
“I’m actually running for state representative in the 80th House District,” Castellano told police, as the cameras following him turned out to be reporters covering his campaign.
“I look forward to winning everyone’s vote: men in blue, women in blue,” he told the officers.
