A federal judge in California has blocked the Department of Homeland Security from carrying out election-related field operations in nine states, ruling that the target lists behind the Trump administration’s hunt for noncitizen voters were built on flawed data. The 19-page preliminary injunction, issued by U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, takes effect at 5 p.m. today unless the appeals court steps in, and it runs until polls close on Election Day, November 3.
The order is narrow, and the judge said so herself. It bars DHS agents from running field operations and interviews that involve — or are likely to involve — people the agents know, suspect, or should reasonably suspect are U.S. citizens, and it bars operations against such people that rest wholly on records from the department’s voter-matching program. It does not make investigating noncitizen voting unlawful, and DHS can still investigate genuine noncitizens. The nine states covered are California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin — the states where the department concentrated the effort.
At the centre of the case is the program the administration calls the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” launched in August. Citizenship and immigration staff built target lists and handed them to Homeland Security Investigations agents, who were sent out under an August 31 “Surge” directive to knock on doors and question people about their eligibility to vote. The lists started with 48.2 million records obtained through independent sources the judge described as having “questionable provenance,” plus 50.6 million more from the Justice Department, some of them commercial copies of voter rolls. The data was run through artificial intelligence tools, and staff were told to treat the results as presumptively valid.
The judge called the initial data “voluminous and unreliable.” During the surge, reviewers had to complete at least 40 reviews, leaving no more than 12 minutes to clear a person from the list using commercial databases — and the immigration service itself conceded that errors will result from “similar names, incomplete records, outdated citizenship information, clerical errors.” Naturalized citizens were among those flagged, including people the data suggested had voted before they naturalized. There is no federal database that definitively records the citizenship of every U.S. resident to check the lists against.
The numbers show why the court lost confidence. In Nevada, a department claim of nearly 16,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter roll collapsed under scrutiny — from 15,903 names down to 185, and eventually to zero.
The lawsuit was brought in September by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, alongside the City and County of San Francisco, Santa Clara County and the Voto Latino Foundation. The judge found the nurses’ unions likely to succeed on their claim that the operation violates the Voting Rights Act’s ban on intimidating people who help others vote, writing that citizens face an “objectively reasonable fear of law enforcement entanglements.” The public’s interest in “safe elections, free from interference or intimidation, far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens,” she wrote, adding: “Declaring that an action is completed pursuant to legal authority does not make the act necessarily lawful.” A whistleblower disclosure released last month had alleged that agents were ordered to misrepresent themselves to obtain voter information.
Government lawyers acknowledged that some American citizens may have been swept up in the investigations but argued the in-person interviews were expressly designed to resolve the discrepancies. The department itself pushed back hard. “DHS is laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens. ONLY Americans should elect American leaders,” a DHS spokesperson said, adding: “We have no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”
And that is the part of this fight no injunction can reach. Whatever the courts decide about the lists, the prosecutions themselves have already delivered the message: voting illegally in a federal election is a crime that ends in prison and removal. A noncitizen weighing whether to cast a ballot knows a knock on the door can follow — and knows just as well that if it comes, it comes for him alone. No activist group will serve that sentence for him, and no Democrat politician who encouraged him will bring a lawyer to take his place. The risk is personal, and everyone in that position understands it. That is why so few are willing to take it.
The administration now has until 5 p.m. today to persuade the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene before the order takes hold. Separately, the Justice Department is suing California over roughly 20,000 voters it says it suspects are not citizens, seeking to stop officials from counting their ballots. The injunction, if it survives the appeal, expires on its own when the polls close on November 3.
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