A federal judge in California on Wednesday blocked the Homeland Security Department from carrying out most field operations focused on uncovering voter fraud in nine states as part of a broader push to identify noncitizen voters.
The ruling came less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The Trump administration has launched a blitz of operations focused on finding evidence of noncitizen voting or tying up election processes in states where it has dubiously claimed that large numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote.
The ruling covered stops and field interviews being carried out by hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents assigned to fan out across the country in search of instances of voter fraud, under what the administration has referred to as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”
In a concise 19-page ruling, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin wrote that the stops appeared likely to hamper voter engagement and registration by a coalition of local governments and nonprofit groups. As with other initiatives in which the Trump administration has used federal immigration data to infer the citizenship status of people on state voter rolls, she wrote there were already signs that the “target lists” the government had generated contained errors and included naturalized citizens.
Judge Martínez-Olguin stopped short of halting field operations. But she barred agents from carrying out interviews that “involve or are likely to involve persons” who agents “know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.” Given the unreliability of federal citizenship data at issue in the case, it was unclear how significantly that would hamper the department’s activities.
The interests of the entities suing, “and the public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation,” she wrote, “far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens.”
Internal documents introduced in the case indicated that agents were directed to focus on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
Judge Martínez-Olguin, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote that the scope of the operations also raised concerns about voter intimidation. She noted that according to agency memos, the Homeland Security Department “surveils, covertly infiltrates and interrogates the staff of nonprofits and churches conducting voter engagement” and had targeted nearly 150 such nonprofit groupsas of July.
The government had indicated it could target naturalized citizens in instances where data suggested an individual had voted before they were naturalized.
The case arose as the Trump administration has mounted a series of legal fights with election officials across the country, aiming to show a pattern of large-scale illegal voting in U.S. elections. The efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part because many of the state and local authorities that administer and supervise elections have refused to comply with demands for access to sensitive voter rolls.
As a result, the federal authorities have compiled their own databases, underpinned by public, commercially available information that they have compared with federal records.
Election authorities in Los Angeles said the Justice Department’s lists of suspected noncitizen voters were so sloppily compiled that they seemed almost “performative” in nature, with thousands of names lacking Social Security numbers and other crucial identifying information. Many of the names, they said, were paired with addresses over which Los Angeles had no jurisdiction.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrar’s office said the list was initially sent on a thumb drive that was unusable because it posed a risk to sensitive voter information, and called the federal demand “a data dump.”
Judge Martínez-Olguin paused her order from taking effect until Friday evening, allowing the government time to appeal. She wrote that order would lift at the end of Election Day, on Nov. 3, “or as otherwise directed by the court.”
It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and decades of evidence show that instances of noncitizen voting are exceptionally rare in the United States, far beneath levels that the administration alleges. Scrutiny of claims by the administration that large numbers of noncitizens voted in states like Nevada, for example, have caused the allegations to collapse.
The Homeland Security Department’s operations aimed at finding verified cases of voter fraud comes as the Trump administration has mounted a series of escalating — and largely unsuccessful — legal fights with election officials across the country, aiming to show a pattern of large-scale illegal voting in U.S. elections.
The administration has particularly singled out states led by Democrats like California, where officials have refused to comply with demands for access to voter rolls. Last week, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles gave local election officials 48 hours to verify the citizenship or segregate the ballots of 20,000 people on a list of potential noncitizens they said had been compiled by the Homeland Security Department.
When California officials said that timeline was impossible to comply with, the Department of Justice filed suit to prevent any ballots sent to those people from being counted.
On Monday, the federal authorities announced they had released from custody 28 immigrants throughout the state who they said were suspected of registering to vote or voting in California elections before becoming naturalized citizens. All had green cards and many denied ever knowingly registering or voting. The group represented a tiny fraction — roughly one in a million — of the roughly 23 million registered voters in the state.
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