Unions representing election workers in California sued the Justice Department on Friday over its efforts to intervene in the state’s administration of the midterm elections, following a flurry of Trump administration threats and subpoenas to officials a day earlier.
The lawsuit is a legal counterattack against Trump political appointees at the department who, in recent days, have intensified their campaign to stop voting by undocumented immigrants, even though studies show such instances are exceedingly rare.
The unions — including the Service Employees International Union, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — are asking a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order to block the department from pressuring local officials to stop counting ballots and turn over election data, and to drop its threats to criminally prosecute officials who do not comply with their demands.
“This case involves unprecedented and unlawful threats by federal government officials to state and local election workers, which significantly risk interfering with the lawful administration of the ongoing 2026 midterm elections and the counting of ballots,” wrote the two lead attorneys in the case Stacey Leyton and Norman Eisen.
A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The department’s leaders have repeatedly said their efforts were not motivated by politics or Mr. Trump’s demands, but rather a good-faith effort to ensure that every ballot cast in the midterms was lawful.
The pressure exerted by the department is the most aggressive intervention by federal law enforcement in elections in recent history. It comes at the direction of President Trump, who has spread falsehoods about undocumented immigrants voting in large numbers and has tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost.
The lawsuit accuses Attorney General Todd Blanche and other top Trump appointees at the department of engaging “in a coordinated campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees.”
On Thursday, the department widened a criminal investigation of California officials, issuing federal grand jury subpoenas to local election officials, after their efforts to prove thousands of noncitizens were on California’s voter rolls foundered in court.
A day earlier, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s bid to block the state from counting the votes of some 20,000 people it claimed are likely to be noncitizens, even though studies have found such fraud is very rare.
The lawsuit accuses the department of relying on flawed or false information on voters provided by the Department of Homeland Security. The claim that the D.H.S. “obtained data from obscure and insecure sources” and augmented it through “commercially available AI of questionable reliability.”
Department officials have privately conceded that all their recent efforts in California — a Democrat-dominated state that has been the target of frequent White House attacks — are unlikely to block the issuance and counting of ballots. And they have not committed to continuing their legal campaign after Election Day, a senior official involved in the effort said on Thursday.
The plaintiffs, part of a broader coalition of progressive groups that also includes the NAACP, have long been preparing for the possibility that the department would seek to exert legal pressure on state and local officials.
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