For the past 20 years, prosecutors say, Lerma voted illegally in federal elections and was an avid Trump supporter who sent money to the Republican Party and was rewarded for his fealty with letters of thanks from the president, former Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and current RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
Gustavo Araujo Lerma, a Sacramento resident and former auto mechanic who prosecutors say was born in Mexico in 1955, is believed to have married his wife there and had children in that country. Then, they say, he came to the United States and remarried his wife in Los Angeles so he could — purportedly as a U.S. citizen — provide legal status to his family members.
In 1992 Lerma bought a birth certificate and Social Security card of a man named Hiram Enrique Velez and assumed his identity.
Velez was a Puerto Rican man who died in 1997.
“Yes, I signed up to vote and I voted,” Lerma testified. “I’m a Republican and I voted for Donald Trump, too.
Lerma was sentenced to 3 years, 9 months in prison.
