Colombian National Pleads Guilty to Using Stolen U.S. Identity for Passport and Ballot

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Carlos Felipe Jaramillo Grajales, a 55-year-old Colombian national living in Jacksonville, pleaded guilty May 6 to making false statements in a U.S. passport application, aggravated identity theft, falsely claiming a Social Security number had been assigned to him, and falsely claiming U.S. citizenship in order to vote in an election.

The charges center on a single individual who used another person's identity documents to secure a U.S. passport and register to vote. Federal prosecutors did not disclose the number of ballots cast or the specific election involved. Sentencing has not been scheduled. Jaramillo Grajales faces a mandatory minimum of two years in federal prison and a maximum of 22 years.

The plea alters the prior state in which the defendant maintained the false identity without federal detection. He now stands convicted on all four counts in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The aggravated identity theft count alone carries a mandatory consecutive two-year sentence that cannot be reduced by judicial discretion.

Downstream, the conviction requires the State Department to review passport records tied to the stolen identity and decide whether to revoke any documents issued under it. Election officials in the relevant jurisdiction must now determine whether the ballot should be retroactively disqualified and assess whether similar identity mismatches exist in their registration databases.

The Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration will receive formal notice of the false SSN claim, triggering administrative checks on any benefits or records linked to that number. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida will next prepare a presentence investigation report that includes loss calculations and victim impact statements from the identity theft victim.

This marks the latest federal prosecution involving non-citizen voting and identity fraud uncovered through passport-application screening. The Department of Justice has pursued similar cases in multiple districts where passport applicants' fingerprints or biographical data matched existing citizen records. The guilty plea was announced by U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe.