Eliud Bonilla, a Brooklyn native born to Puerto Rican parents, is as American as they come. But in 2016, the NASA engineer working on a mission to reach the sun found himself suddenly removed from Virginia’s voter rolls, wrongly flagged as a “noncitizen.”

Recalling his visit to the county election office to fix the mistake, Bonilla said, “I remember trying to make small talk with the clerk about what happened. She just matter-of-factly said, ‘This happens a lot.'”

Although Bonilla was eventually able to vote without further issues, the incident soon took a darker turn. A conservative election watchdog group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, published a report in 2017 titled “Alien Invasion II,” which included a list of alleged noncitizen voters in Virginia. Bonilla’s personal information appeared in the report, suggesting he and hundreds of others had committed voter fraud.

Bonilla described his reaction as one of anger and concern. “‘How dare you?’ was all I could think,” he said. “I became worried because of safety, because, unfortunately, we’ve seen too many examples in this country of people taking drastic measures to correct what they perceive as wrong.”

His experience highlights the consequences of aggressive efforts to purge state voter rolls of individuals suspected of being noncitizens. Experts say many of those purged are newly naturalized citizens or victims of clerical errors or paperwork mistakes.