DOJ in Puerto Rico halted drugs-for-votes election-fraud probe after Trump win

ProPublica reported on May 5, 2026 that career federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Puerto Rico had spent months building a case that leaders of the prison gang Group 31 — also known as "Los Tiburones," or "the Sharks" — were selling drugs to inmates in exchange for their votes for now-Governor Jenniffer González-Colón during the 2024 election cycle. According to the account, line prosecutors had gathered evidence implicating inmates and prison staff and were examining possible ties to the González-Colón campaign, including evidence that the candidate had communicated with one of the gang's leaders on WhatsApp during the primary.

In November 2024, days after Donald Trump won the presidency and González-Colón clinched the governorship, supervisors at the U.S. Attorney's Office instructed line prosecutors to remove the voting-fraud counts against inmates and all charges against prison staff from the planned indictment. Once Trump took office in January 2025, prosecutors were told to abandon the inquiry into any campaign-related ties entirely. The indictment filed in December 2024 ultimately charged 34 alleged Group 31 members and associates with drug-distribution offenses tied to overdose deaths, money laundering, and firearm possession, but no voting-related or prison-staff counts. González-Colón has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged.

In the weeks that followed the disclosure, Puerto Rico's resident commissioner in Congress, Pablo José Hernández Rivera, joined by House Democrats Robert Garcia (Calif.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), Adriano Espaillat (N.Y.), and Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), publicly called for the DOJ Office of the Inspector General and Congress to investigate why the probe was narrowed and then abandoned. The Puerto Rico House of Representatives passed Resolution RC-693 directing its Committee on Public Security to examine the matter. The archive-worthy event here is the federal-prosecutorial action — supervisors steering a built-out election-fraud prosecution off course following the candidate's electoral win — not the underlying gang scheme itself, which remains an unindicted allegation.