A federal judge on Wednesday night blocked the Department of Homeland Security from conducting election-related field operations that could sweep up U.S. citizens in nine states.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, an appointee of President Joe Biden in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, issued a preliminary injunction after voting rights advocates alleged that Homeland Security was sending armed agents to homes to question residents about their voter status. 

The injunction bars operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin until polls close on Election Day, though the administration may appeal in the coming days.

The decision marks a legal setback to the Trump administration’s intensifying campaign this fall against noncitizen voting ahead of Election Day. It comes as the Department of Justice is suing California to force state and local election officials to not count the ballots of some 20,000 voters the federal government says it suspects are noncitizens.

President Donald Trump has long decried the threat of noncitizen voting, which studies have shown rarely occurs. He now faces political peril, as Democrats appear increasingly likely to retake the U.S. House and possibly the Senate in the midterm elections.

Martínez-Olguín found that the importance of the public voting free of intimidation outweighed the Trump administration’s interest in rooting out noncitizen voting. But she paused her order until Friday, presumably to give the Trump administration time to appeal.

The evidence in the case, she wrote, leads to an “objectively reasonable fear of law enforcement entanglements that intimidates citizens from urging or aiding others in exercising their right to vote.”

The lawsuit was filed by San Francisco, Santa Clara, the California Nurses Association, National Nurses United and the Voto Latino Foundation. 

“Today, the courts affirmed a vital principle of our democracy: Voting is a fundamental right that citizens – whether born here or naturalized – should be able to exercise without armed government agents harassing them,” Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer at the legal advocacy group Protect Democracy, which represented the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

Martínez-Olguín wrote that the “ongoing intimidation that CNA/NNU members experience and the direct impediment it plays in their effort to engage voter outreach, education, and engagement efforts, are irreparable harms that are appropriately addressed by preliminary injunctive relief.”

A Homeland Security Investigations internal memo dated Aug. 31 describes a “surge initiative” beginning Sept. 1 that includes conducting field interviews. The memo, which was filed in court, identifies California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin as targets of the surge during September. Additional locations are redacted in the document.

Homeland Security said in a statement Thursday that it has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”

In a previous court filing, Department of Justice lawyers representing DHS have argued that the federal government has the authority to investigate potential voting by noncitizens. 

“Enjoining the government from even investigating such criminal violations would damage the public interest, not serve it,” they wrote.

Democratic groups and top Democrats in Congress filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block Trump intimidating election officials.

National Democrats are suing President Donald Trump, accusing his administration of intimidating election officials and asking a federal court to block him from interfering in the midterm elections.

The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday in Washington, D.C., comes as the Trump administration mounts a highly public offensive against voter fraud in California just two weeks before Election Day and as federal agents face allegations they are questioning people at their homes about their voter status.

The Department of Justice has sued state and local officials, demanding they not count the ballots of roughly 20,000 California voters that the DOJ alleges are noncitizens and suggesting they will face prosecution if they do. The Trump administration is currently scrutinizing an additional 17,000 California voters, according to a court filing.

Jeffries, Schumer sign on 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who’s in line to become speaker if his party retakes the House, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with other Democratic groups and a California voter, allege in their lawsuit that the Trump administration has engaged in a pattern of intimidation intended to frighten officials into complying with unlawful demands to thwart voting.

The executive branch has no authority to assert authority over states’ maintenance of their own voter rolls and determinations of who is qualified to vote, they say. The U.S. Constitution assigns states the responsibility of administering elections.

“Thwarted in Congress and the courts, the administration has now simply disregarded the tools Congress provided it and fashioned its own cudgels instead,” lawyers for the Democrats write in their legal complaint.

The lawsuit names Trump, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the leaders of both agencies as defendants.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department said in a statement that it enforces federal election law and that election integrity is a top priority. Every action the DOJ has taken related to this year’s elections, the statement said, “is grounded in law and being litigated in open court.”

Homeland Security called the lawsuit a “political stunt.”

Dozens of states unsuccessfully sued by DOJ

Noncitizen voting is a rare phenomenon, studies have consistently found. The Justice Department this week charged 38 noncitizens in California with election crimes, an infinitesimal percentage of registered voters. 

Even if all 20,000 individuals on the DOJ list are noncitizens, it would represent only about 0.08% of the nearly 23.2 million registered voters in California. 

For more than a year, the Trump administration has attempted to influence how states run elections. The Justice Department sued dozens of states — all unsuccessfully — to force them to hand over sensitive data on voters. Homeland Security refashioned a powerful computer program called SAVE into a tool that can verify citizenship, though critics say it falsely flags U.S. citizens.

Trump pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would have required voters nationwide to prove their citizenship. The legislation passed the House but encountered bipartisan opposition in the Senate, where a handful of Republicans and Democrats prevented it from advancing.

Trump also attempted to use the U.S. Postal Service to impose national restrictions on voting by mail. The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Postal Service rules from taking effect ahead of the midterms.

The broad effort has played out as Trump’s political fortunes appear to be dimming. Just 36% of likely voters approve of Trump’s performance, according to a New York Times-Siena University poll released Wednesday. If Democrats retake the House or Senate, they will likely initiate a myriad of investigations into Trump and his administration that could consume the final two years of his term.

New blitz in California

Against that backdrop, the Trump administration has in recent days launched a new voter fraud blitz targeting California, a blue state that mails ballots to all voters. 

Last week the Justice Department provided state and local officials with 20,000 names that it said Homeland Security had identified as likely noncitizens. After giving state officials just 48 hours to act on the list, the DOJ sued. 

On Monday, DOJ attorneys asked for a temporary restraining order that would immediately force California to comply with their demands that these individuals not be provided mail ballots and that their ballots not count unless they offer proof of citizenship. It also suggested in a court filing that Homeland Security could accuse more California voters of being noncitizens.

Nicolas Bartell, associate director of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a sub-agency of Homeland Security, said in a declaration filed in court on Tuesday that USCIS “has identified a separate batch of more than 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens after an initial review of voter rolls.”

But Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan is casting doubt on the reliability of Homeland Security’s review — and arguing complying with the DOJ’s demands would severely disrupt the election locally.

Logan’s office analyzed a sample of 200 names of the 20,000 provided by the Justice Department. In a court filing, lawyers for Logan wrote that his office found that 25.8% of the sample recorded a U.S. birthplace, a guarantee of citizenship except in extremely limited circumstances. About 71% had never voted.

Monica Flores, the assistant registrar-recorder for the Candidate and Voter Services Bureau, wrote in a court declaration that if forced to comply with the Justice Department’s demands, “it would be virtually impossible to timely certify the election results in compliance with state law.”

‘Fearmongering and intimidation’

California state Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Democrat, at a news conference on Tuesday called the Trump administration’s efforts an attempt to silence voters. She urged voters not to be afraid.

“This is a federal administration that operates through fearmongering and intimidation,” Gonzalez said.

San Francisco, Santa Clara and several advocacy groups sued Homeland Security in September in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that DHS has authorized broad election-related field operations. Armed agents have been sent to homes to interrogate residents about their voter eligibility, the lawsuit says.

The California Nurses Association, National Nurses United and the Voto Latino Foundation joined the local governments in suing.

A Homeland Security Investigations internal memo dated Aug. 31 describes a “surge initiative” beginning Sept. 1 that includes conducting field interviews. The memo, which was filed in court, identifies California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin as targets of the surge during September. Additional locations are redacted in the document.

“DHS’ stated intention of questioning Americans at their homes weeks before an election is voter intimidation, and protections against this form of harassment extend beyond the polling place,” Hayden Johnson, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a legal advocacy group representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement when the lawsuit was filed.

Justice Department lawyers have responded in court filings that the plaintiffs haven’t identified a single affected voter. The allegations of intimidation also lack specifics, the DOJ says.

The federal government has statutory authority to investigate potential voting by noncitizens,” DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing. “Enjoining the government from even investigating such criminal violations would damage the public interest, not serve it.”

A hearing on a preliminary injunction in the case was held Monday. No decision was immediately issued.

A federal grand jury indicted 10 noncitizens for unlawfully voting in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday, highlighting the administration’s effort to keep election security a top issue, in line with President Donald Trump’s longstanding unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

The indictments, which include nine counts of unlawful voting and nine counts of falsely claiming citizenship to register to vote, bring the number of noncitizens charged nationwide with election-related crimes since Trump re-took office last year to 90. The census reports 154 million people voted in the 2024 election.

Blanche said at a news conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the indictments show how seriously the administration takes election security.

“We have talked repeatedly about the importance of election integrity, and we’re certainly not going to stop talking about that now,” he said. “Voter fraud erodes the public’s trust in our electoral system, and it’s vital to our democratic process that we do everything that we can to restore that trust.”

Blanche’s participation in a press conference, alongside fellow Cabinet member Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, underlined the administration’s continuing focus on noncitizen voting, though numerous studies have shown it to be rare. Trump has for years amplified debunked conspiracy theories centered on election fraud.

Mullin made that connection explicit Wednesday, saying the indictments confirmed Trump’s accusations.

“The president said it for a long time, and the Democrats were sitting there denying it and saying, ‘There’s no fraud. That wasn’t taking place. There’s no fraud. There’s nothing, nothing here. Don’t look over here,’” he said. “We’re realizing there’s actually a lot. And we believe that some of these states probably even knew about it, chose not to look into it. Well, we are.”

But the allegations of illegal voting in Minnesota in the 2022 and 2024 general elections and 2026 primaries made virtually no difference to election results. 

The seven alleged illegal votes in the 2024 presidential election, for example, would account for only .0002% of votes cast in that election in Minnesota.

Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to identify and remove noncitizen voters hasn’t produced the kind of large purges that could meaningfully affect the midterm elections.

Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states access to a supercharged Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’ citizenship will have a limited immediate impact, election experts say. 

As Republicans fight to retain control of Congress, Trump and his allies have spent the past year aggressively seeking to root out noncitizen voting. 

They have called into question the security of the upcoming elections, following the lead of the president, who has long made spurious claims of voter fraud to dismiss unfavorable results.

Those efforts are now colliding with federal law — and the reality long shown by studies and available data that noncitizen voting is rare.

Little impact seen from court ruling

The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 ruled in a 6-3 decision that states can access Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which draws upon citizenship information stored across the federal government to scour voter rolls in the hunt for possible noncitizens. A district court judge had blocked the program in June.

But the high court’s decision came during a quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits most states from conducting mass purges of voters in the 90 days before a federal election. 

The timing limits election officials to only searching for information on individual voters, even though Homeland Security has touted SAVE to states as a tool that can quickly scan millions of names.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority acknowledged as much, writing in its unsigned opinion that the quiet period “limits the potential impact” of the court’s decision. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the court’s three liberals, agreed the decision would have minimal short-term effects but argued the possibility of disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighed any risk of harm to the government.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, in a statement emphasized that voters will continue to experience the same safe, secure and reliable voting process this year as in the past.

“This decision will not have any significant impact on the 2026 election, as systematic voter list maintenance is prohibited within 90 days of a federal election, which the Supreme Court explicitly confirmed,” Becker said.

Post-2026

The more significant fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision may come in the weeks and months after the election, when states can once again remove large numbers of voters from their rolls. 

The Supreme Court is also set to hold oral arguments in December in a case that involves the reach of the National Voter Registration’s Act’s quiet period — leaving open the possibility the justices could give states more leeway to purge voters ahead of elections.

But for now, the restrictions remain in place.

“Until the Supreme Court says, reinterprets otherwise, the quiet period is still the quiet period,” Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview.

Separately, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to require states to use SAVE as a condition of receiving some Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Judge Amir H. Ali, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that FEMA exceeded its authority in imposing election-related requirements.

Is the data reliable?

SAVE’s critics, which include Democrats and privacy advocates, warn that the system relies on incomplete and sometimes outdated data, resulting in false positives. SAVE was previously used to check whether noncitizens were eligible for various government benefits before the Trump administration last year repurposed it into a tool to check citizenship.

When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., ruled against the program in June, she highlighted sworn declarations by naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data in SAVE.

“SAVE was never designed to verify citizenship: it relies on outdated and inaccurate data that produces false matches, risks disenfranchising eligible voters, and exposes sensitive personal information to misuse and bad actors,” Tim Harper, a project lead focused on elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan organization focused on civil liberties in the digital age, said in a statement.

The Trump administration and some Republicans hail SAVE as a powerful tool to ensure the accuracy of voter rolls and identify noncitizens who shouldn’t be registered to vote. They note that its use by states is voluntary.

“It’s remarkable that we had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we can use government data to stop noncitizens from voting illegally. American elections are for Americans,” James Percival, Homeland Security’s general counsel, said in a statement.

In an email to States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis faulted Democrats for not voting for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require voters to produce documents proving their citizenship before voting. The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid bipartisan opposition.

“The American people overwhelmingly support this commonsense legislation that enacts basic election security measures like voter ID and ensures only Americans are electing America’s leaders. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said..

How many instances of noncitizen voting?

The Trump administration’s intense focus on noncitizen voting — which also includes a legal effort to force states to turn over voter data to the Department of Justice — contrasts with the extremely rare nature of noncitizen voting, according to past studies and election experts.

The U.S. Census in August identified about 24,000 instances of noncitizen voting in the 2020 election out of roughly 160 million votes cast, or 0.015% of all votes. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But Homeland Security has suggested large numbers of noncitizens may be registered to vote. In July, the department said it had identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

On Monday, U.S. Senate Democrats in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote that they couldn’t trust those numbers. For instance, DHS initially floated nearly 16,000 possible noncitizen voters in Nevada. In the end, the agency provided state officials with a list of 185 people that officials said were noncitizens. All turned out to be citizens.

“Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and every eligible voter across America has the right to cast a ballot — and should be able to do so without fear of being wrongly purged from the voting rolls,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision.

The alleged scale of potential noncitizen voter registration by Homeland Security also doesn’t match the scope of the agency’s law enforcement actions. Earlier in September, Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, reported making 160 recent arrests from 1,600 open voter fraud cases.

When noncitizens do end up on voter rolls, administrative errors are sometimes to blame. In July, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced that a software glitch caused about 6,600 noncitizens to become registered to vote and that about 400 had cast ballots. 

And in April, then-Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, wrote in a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that some noncitizens had been registered to vote because of a clerical error despite acknowledging on a voter application that they weren’t U.S. citizens.

“That is why we urge voter registrars to use all available sources to confirm a person’s citizenship status — including SAVE data and other information about the registrant — when they are investigating whether the person is eligible to be a registered voter,” Nelson wrote in an email obtained by Democracy Forward, a pro-democracy legal organization.

Federal officials charged a Utah letter carrier Tuesday with throwing 300 primary ballots in a church parking lot dumpster, an incident that a top U.S. Justice Department official said made the case for stricter regulations of voting.

The prosecution of Damon Matai Seei, of Payson, Utah, showed “voting fraud is real,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a press conference at DOJ headquarters in Washington.

The Justice Department gave the arrest an unusually high profile, spotlighting the administration’s efforts to combat voter fraud after the U.S. Supreme Court this month blocked a new U.S. Postal Service rule limiting mail voting from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The regulation was meant to “address the chronically abused mail-in ballot system,” McCotter said. He criticized the trial judge who initially blocked the rule, which would have required special tracking and design features, among other things such as creating a national database of eligible voters.

“Election integrity should not be a political or partisan issue,” McCotter said. “Who could be against properly tracking mail-in ballots? Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, that regulation was blocked by a judge in Massachusetts. … The Trump administration, however, will continue taking aggressive actions to protect our elections.”

Postal Service rule

U.S. District Judge Indiria Talwani’s order blocking the rule is only in effect for the Nov. 3 elections, a provision meant to preserve the status quo because the rule was finalized mere months before the midterms. The merits of the case are still being argued. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Talwani’s decision.

The prosecution of Seei, and the attention the administration sought to give it, undercut a key argument the administration made in the case: The rule included only “modest” technical specifications for a category of mail and should not be interpreted as an election regulation.

The U.S. Constitution grants states the authority to administer elections, with policy oversight from Congress. 

In siding with the Democratic states and voting rights groups who filed suit, Talwani and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit said the rule was clearly an attempt to affect election policy and was not restricted to a modest mail regulation.

Trump and mail-in voting

President Donald Trump has railed against mail-in voting and claimed, without evidence, that it is a major source of election fraud and contributed to his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.

Since Trump retook office in January 2025, the department has charged 70 immigrants with illegally voting, compared with only 13 in the four years of Biden’s term, McCotter said Tuesday.

“And we intend to bring many more,” he added.

Homeland Security Investigations, a Homeland Security Department agency, has made 160 recent arrests, from 1,600 open voter fraud cases, HSI acting Deputy Executive Associate Director Matthew Millhollin said.

A reporter in the room noted that 70 prosecutions amounted to a bare fraction of the 150 million votes cast in the 2024 election.

McCotter responded that the Utah case involved 300 ballots, and that law enforcement had only scratched the surface of possible incidents. “Thousands more” cases were being investigated, he said.

“The folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist this has never happened, that there is no voting fraud,” he said. “And so when we have dozens of cases … I think that discourages and defeats their characterization.”

No partisan motive alleged

Seei, who is no longer a postal worker, intentionally threw out about 300 mail ballots on June 3 that were being mailed to voters in advance of the June 23 primary in Utah, according to charging documents.

In an interview with law enforcement, he indicated he did not have a political motive but said he threw away the mail, which also included advertisements, “because he wanted to ‘lighten his workload’ so he could presumably go home earlier,” prosecutors said.

Melissa Holyoak, the top federal prosecutor for Utah, traveled to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday’s press conference. She noted that 95% of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail.

Many people in Seei’s delivery area in Eagle Mountain, Utah, complained to the Utah County Clerk that they hadn’t received ballots, Holyoak said. Using county databases, the clerk found that voter participation was “remarkably low” in the area where complaints originated.

“As American citizens, we have certain freedoms and rights,” Holyoak said. “And one of those fundamental rights is the right to vote. But when defendant allegedly tossed the mail-in ballots into a parking lot dumpster, those citizens’ right to vote were also thrown away.”

The federal public defender representing Seei did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security officers may have broken state laws carrying out the Trump administration’s orders to find noncitizens voting illegally in federal elections, Democratic senators alleged Monday following a whistleblower complaint.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the whistleblower detailed the department’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” in which U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services immigration officers combed through state voter rolls, sometimes pretending to be the voter to access records. 

U.S. citizens were also swept up in the efforts due to faulty data and pressure from top officials to meet a quota of five investigations per hour, or 12 minutes per inquiry, according to the whistleblower’s account. 

“We just got more proof of (President Donald) Trump’s vile schemes to rig our elections,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat. “A DHS whistleblower warns that the department is pulling hundreds, hundreds of federal agents from national security roles, and sending them on a wild goose chase. The goal: to try and prove Trump’s sad, tired and long debunked election conspiracy theories.”

The New York Times was the first to report the existence of the DHS operation.

California Sen. Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration that oversees federal elections, said the president “will go to extraordinary lengths to try to interfere with the midterm elections.”

Padilla said the whistleblower came forward last week.  

Padilla and Schumer called for DHS to shut down the operation. The department did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

“Donald Trump knows his record has been so bad,” Padilla said. “His only chance at keeping Republican majorities in Congress is to interfere with the elections.”

Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, and cases are extremely rare. Some localities have passed laws to allow for noncitizen voting in local elections. 

But the topic is a priority for the president, who has directed DHS to investigate voter rolls for illegal voting by noncitizens. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced two noncitizens from Kansas and Louisiana illegally voted in federal elections.

“Voter fraud is already a serious problem, but non-citizens voting is even worse,” Mullin said. “Every time a non-citizen casts a ballot, it steals a vote from an American citizen.”