Judge Limits Homeland Security Door-to-Door Voter Checks in Nine States

A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop sending agents to question people it has reason to believe are citizens about their immigration status and voting history, ruling that the operation likely violates the Voting Rights Act less than two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections.

In an order issued late Wednesday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the federal district court in Oakland, California, barred election-related field operations and interviews in nine states: California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. Agents may not target people they know, suspect or should reasonably suspect are citizens, and they may not act solely on records produced by the government’s voter-matching program without further investigation.

The judge, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that the target lists draw on government and commercial data with a high likelihood of error, and she cited a whistleblower’s account that the matching work had been rushed and had swept in citizens. She also pointed to the agency’s social media posts showing armed officers approaching homes and making arrests. Together, she found, the unreliable data and the publicized arrests create a reasonable fear that discourages citizens from helping others register and vote, the kind of intimidation the Voting Rights Act forbids.

The order was paused until 5 p.m. Friday to give the government time to seek an appeal. Unless it is changed, it remains in force until polls close on Election Day.

The lawsuit was brought by the California Nurses Association, National Nurses United, the Voto Latino Foundation and the counties of San Francisco and Santa Clara, with lawyers from Protect Democracy and the National Immigration Law Center. A court filing from the nurses’ unions described naturalized members who had stopped going to rallies, volunteering as poll workers or voting in person because of the visits.

The ruling does not end federal investigations of illegal voting. The judge wrote that such investigations are lawful in themselves and that the plaintiffs had not challenged them. That is the administration’s strongest point: voting by noncitizens is a federal crime, and the government says it has every right to pursue it. In a statement, the department said it is focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing noncitizens who vote and has no plans to question people it believes to be citizens. The Justice Department has said 156 people have been charged with voting-fraud offenses since the start of the Trump administration.

Election officials and researchers have long found that noncitizen voting is rare. State reviews and audits have repeatedly turned up only small numbers of cases, and the administration’s own investigations have pointed the same way.

A Homeland Security official told the court in a sworn declaration that his staff reviews records by hand before referring them to investigators, while acknowledging a low possibility that citizens could be wrongly flagged. He argued that any remaining risk was outweighed by the agency’s law enforcement mission.

The case is one of several pre-election fights over the federal push. The Justice Department is separately suing California to make the state set aside mail ballots from about 20,000 voters it says are likely noncitizens until their citizenship can be confirmed.