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. Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin said the stops appeared likely to hamper voter engagement. The ruling came less than two weeks before the upcoming midterm elections.
The ruling largely blocked homeland security agents from carrying out field interviews in nine states, including California, as part of a sprawling effort to find noncitizens registered to vote.
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.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended its methods, saying federal officials had used multiple data sources in addition to the public voter data they pulled to further verify the identity of registrants and eliminate false positives.
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.
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