Twelve days before the midterms, a federal judge has told Homeland Security to stop knocking on voters' doors in nine states — where agents are interviewing people the government has reason to believe are American citizens about how they vote.
A federal judge in California on Wednesday barred the Department of Homeland Security from carrying out elections-related field interviews in nine states, ruling that the department's "Unlawful Voter Initiative" — which sends Homeland Security Investigations agents to the homes of people officials know or suspect are U.S. citizens — likely violates the Voting Rights Act's prohibition on voter intimidation.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, sitting in the Northern District of California, issued the preliminary injunction in California Nurses Association v. Mullin, a case brought by plaintiffs including National Nurses United, the Voto Latino Foundation, the City of San Francisco and Santa Clara County, represented by Protect Democracy. The order covers California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. It takes effect at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 23, after a brief stay, and runs until the polls close on November 3. It expressly does not bar DHS from investigating unlawful voting itself.
The judge's reasoning rested on the data behind the target lists. The interviews are built from 48.2 million records from independent sources and 50.6 million state and commercial records — data that, she wrote, "is widely known to inadvertently include U.S. citizens." She faulted "the reliance on admittedly flawed and incomplete data to create a list of individuals for HSI to interview," and concluded: "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."
"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."
The scale of the two sides' claims is far apart. DHS has estimated that up to 250,000 noncitizens may be registered to vote — a figure election experts dispute — and Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged in a July letter that more than 190,000 were registered in California alone. The Justice Department, by contrast, reports that only 156 people have been charged with voting-fraud offenses since the administration took office.
"The current policy targets known naturalized citizens," said plaintiffs' counsel Beau Tremitiere of Protect Democracy. "Those operations are prohibited." DHS had not commented on the ruling itself as of Thursday morning; the department posted on X on Wednesday that HSI "is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found," and a spokesperson told CBS: "Those who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear."
The initiative began in June 2026 as an HSI "Criminal Voter Fraud" surge; a whistleblower described an internal quota of roughly 40 subjects a day, and on October 19 agents in California arrested more than 20 green-card holders. The administration can seek emergency relief from the Ninth Circuit — with twelve days to Election Day, the door-knocking question is now on the same clock as the election itself.