Federal prosecutors have charged a Coatesville woman with voting illegally in two Chester County elections while not a U.S. citizen.

Dilea Ochoa-Perez, 43, faces two counts of voting as an alien for allegedly casting ballots in the November 2022 and November 2024 general elections, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The Department of Justice described Ochoa-Perez as a Mexican citizen residing in the U.S. illegally who was not an American citizen at the time of either election.

The charges, filed by information rather than indictment, were announced Thursday, Sept. 24, by U.S. Attorney David Metcalf. If convicted on both counts, Ochoa-Perez faces up to two years in prison, one year of supervised release, a $200,000 fine and a $50 special assessment. She is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Ochoa-Perez is one of four noncitizens charged in separate federal cases announced the same day. The other three defendants are accused of voting or submitting fraudulent voter registration applications in Philadelphia County. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) investigated all four cases.

Metcalf said in a statement that anyone who votes illegally in U.S. elections will be prosecuted. Nathan Abel, the HSI special agent in charge of the Philadelphia office, said noncitizen voting undermines confidence in the election process.

The charges are the second round of noncitizen voting cases the Justice Department has filed in Pennsylvania in September 2026. On Sept. 4, prosecutors charged a Carlisle man and his noncitizen wife, and separately a Harrisburg resident, with crimes related to registering and voting in the November 2024 election, as Votebeat and Spotlight PA reported.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter has said the Department of Justice has charged 70 people with voting fraud so far in 2026, compared with 13 in four years under former President Joe Biden. Votebeat and Spotlight PA reported that nothing suggests the cases are related or that the fraud is happening on any coordinated scale.

In July 2026, the Department of Homeland Security claimed it had identified 250,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in four states, including 14,576 in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Department of State has said noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country. As of Sept. 26, the state had not responded to a DHS offer to share the full list of potential noncitizen registrants.

How Ochoa-Perez came to be registered to vote in Chester County has not been described in any public filing. No arraignment date or next court appearance has been announced, and Chester County election officials have not publicly commented on the charges.