A federal judge in California restricted the Department of Homeland Security’s authority to send federal agents to question people at their homes about their immigration status and voting history, saying the department is using unreliable data to do so.
In the weeks ahead of the midterms, President Donald Trump’s administration has ramped up efforts to crack down on what it claims is widespread voter fraud, despite noncitizen voting being extremely rare. In late August, DHS directed hundreds of immigration agents to pause their normal duties to search for evidence of noncitizen voting, according to whistleblower reports.
In the Wednesday order, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, a Joe Biden appointee, also found that DHS’s fraud crackdown likely violates voting-rights protections by frightening eligible citizens out of participating in the midterms.
Threats have already caused members of the California Nurses Association — which is suing DHS and Secretary Markwayne Mullin — to “withdraw from participating in electoral activity because they reasonably fear being subjected to physical, legal, or reputational harm to themselves and their loved ones,” Martínez-Olguín wrote.
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The injunction covers the nine states DHS targeted in its operation: California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. The order restricts election-related field operations and interviews that could involve people agents know or reasonably should suspect are U.S. citizens.
The order focuses on a “voluminous and unreliable” list of potential targets — data that includes 48.2 million records that DHS received through independent sources “of questionable provenance,” Martínez-Olguín wrote, and another 50.6 million records from official state voter-roll data or from unreliable commercial versions of voter-roll data.
The California Nurses Association argues the data is being used to “surveil, covertly infiltrate, and interrogate the staff of non-profits and churches conducting voter engagement” for purposes of carrying out the campaign.
DHS-led doorknocking investigations have ramped up since September.
Martínez-Olguín said that 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.”
“Defendants announced the deployment of armed officers in a militarized action to individuals’ homes and communities during the final months before midterm elections, inspiring fear in the CNA/NNU members who wish to mobilize, educate, and assist voters,” she added.
California has been involved in a separate legal battle with the Justice Department, which tried to force the state to halt or set aside 20,000 ballots from potential noncitizen voters. State officials called the agency’s latest interrogations “voter suppression.” Tensions continued to rise after federal agents arrested dozens of green-card holders on allegations they sought illegal voter registrations.
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