President Donald Trump’s 11th-hour campaign to intervene in California’s vote counting encountered its first resistance from federal courts on Monday, with appellate judges ruling against the effort.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a U.S. Department of Justice request for a court order requiring California election officials to segregate and not count the ballots of some 20,000 voters, who federal officials say are suspected noncitizens, until those voters can prove otherwise. The decision, issued Monday, came after rare oral arguments on Sunday.

Two of the three judges sharply questioned a Justice Department lawyer over the demand, as well as the timeline of the agency’s actions. A third judge appeared more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s arguments.

The oral arguments, held virtually, came after the Justice Department said a district court judge hadn’t ruled fast enough on its request for a temporary restraining order to require California officials to set aside the ballots of suspected noncitizens. 

In Monday’s 2-1 decision, the majority wrote that the appeals court lacked jurisdiction over the case because the DOJ “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” the request.

One of the appellate judges emphasized on Sunday that the district court judge had swiftly scheduled a hearing, currently set for Tuesday, less than a week after receiving the case.

“I don’t see how we have jurisdiction,” said Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee who often led the skeptical questioning of the DOJ.

Last-minute push

As Election Day approaches, the Trump administration is mounting a furious final bid to assert authority over state and local election officials. 

The Justice Department first demanded immediate action in a last-minute lawsuit that alleges ballots cast by alleged noncitizens in California risk diluting the votes of U.S. citizens. 

It then opened a new front on Friday, preemptively suing Alaska over the future certification of its U.S. Senate race. Democrats and voting rights groups filed a flurry of court papers over the weekend opposing the Alaska lawsuit.

Sunday’s oral arguments in the California case, which lasted nearly two hours, marked the first courtroom showdown in the Trump administration’s new round of preelection legal action. One or both lawsuits could be before the U.S. Supreme Court within days, depending on the speed of lower courts.

An ‘astronomical’ number of ballots

Justice Department attorney Matthew Donnelly told the three-judge panel that the DOJ decided to seek an emergency order after learning how many mail-in ballots election officials were already processing, at least several hundred thousand so far. 

He said the agency hadn’t been aware of what he called the “astronomical” number of ballots as he explained why the DOJ didn’t ask for a temporary restraining order until four days after it first sued California.

“Frankly, we did not appreciate the scale,” Donnelly said, though California is a universal vote-by-mail state that sends a ballot to all voters.

Seth Waxman, a lawyer for Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, told the court that Donnelly’s assertion was “absurd on its face.” Election officials in California have warned that complying with the Justice Department’s demands so close to Election Day could have catastrophic consequences. 

“The numbers are publicly available,” Waxman said.

Authority over elections

The U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause places the responsibility for administering elections with the states, with Congress retaining the power to override state regulations. 

Donnelly clashed with Bennett over whether the legal basis for the Justice Department’s demands of California, a federal law that makes it a misdemeanor crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, represents an instance of Congress asserting its authority over elections.

Donnelly said the federal law preempts California’s action “here that frustrates its purpose” — in other words, the refusal of state and local officials to set aside the suspected noncitizen ballots. 

But Bennett said California law also bans noncitizen voting, and he argued that what Congress passed doesn’t directly change the rules state lawmakers adopted, which require voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they are qualified to vote.

‘An emergency of their own making’

The Trump administration has said the Department of Homeland Security compiled the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens based on public California voter data it obtained. 

Judge Gabriel Sanchez, an appointee of President Joe Biden, questioned the reliability of the list, noting that federal officials initially told California this summer they believed the state had potentially more than 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls.

“Somehow the district court was supposed to resolve all this in a matter of hours by noon on October 22?” Sanchez said, referring to the deadline the Justice Department requested for a decision from the district court judge.

Samuel Siegel, a lawyer representing California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, told the appeals court the voter list the Trump administration obtained was “wildly outdated.” He said the 9th Circuit has nothing to decide because U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, has yet to rule.

“It is an emergency of their own making,” Siegel said of the Justice Department.

Sanchez and Bennett agreed. In a per curiam majority opinion, they wrote the “United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”

Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee and the only judge on the panel who at times appeared to agree with the Justice Department’s arguments, pushed Siegel on the consequences of not ordering California to set aside the ballots. Donnelly said repeatedly that once the ballots are processed, it becomes impossible to pull them out, even if it later becomes clear they were fraudulently cast.

“Without an injunction, you’ll never know, correct?” Bumatay asked Siegel, who responded that voters must affirm their citizenship.

Bumatay dissented from Monday’s opinion. He wrote that he would have granted the DOJ request.

“The question—does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections? Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes,’” Bumatay wrote.

Carter has promised to rule promptly after a Tuesday hearing on the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order. A denial could prompt the DOJ to appeal again.

The U.S. Department of Justice is stepping up its legal campaign over the midterm elections, suing Alaska over its U.S. Senate election and appealing a lawsuit against suspected noncitizen voters in California.

Election law experts have cast doubt on the strength of the cases, criticizing them as performative.

The Justice Department sued Alaska election officials late Thursday in a preemptive attempt to stop the state from certifying the results of its Senate election if, under the state’s ranked-choice voting method, the Republican incumbent loses by a smaller margin than the votes earned by another candidate of the same name. 

Separately, the Justice Department appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals a lawsuit seeking to prevent California election officials from counting the ballots of approximately 20,000 voters it says are likely noncitizens unless they can prove their citizenship. The DOJ had demanded a district court decision by Thursday.

Collectively, the Justice Department’s actions signal an expanding legal effort to assert authority over voting as Election Day approaches. President Donald Trump faces political peril in the midterms, with Democrats all but certain to launch investigations into his administration if they retake the House or Senate.

The Trump administration’s past attempts to influence how states run elections largely failed, with the U.S. Supreme Court blocking proposed restrictions on mail ballots and federal judges dismissing DOJ lawsuits to obtain states’ sensitive voter data. But in the waning days before the midterm elections, federal officials are again ramping up election-related activity.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump, speaking to reporters on Friday, said of the Alaska lawsuit.

Another Dan Sullivan suit

The Alaska lawsuit came hours after U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to rule out efforts to block states from certifying their elections. Speaking to reporters after an unrelated event in Virginia, Blanche said it wasn’t the DOJ’s intention to “improperly interfere” with election certifications even as he left room for his department to act.

“I mean, is there any scenario? Yes, of course there’s scenarios that we could all come up with, hypothetically, you know, some doomsday scenario, for example, right?” Blanche said.

The Alaska Division of Elections and the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the Alaska Senate race, Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and his supporters have cast Dan J. Sullivan, also a Republican, as a spoiler in a competitive race against Democrat Mary Peltola. 

State officials initially kept Dan J. Sullivan off the August primary ballot but the Alaska Supreme Court overturned the decision. He finished third, with 2.5% of the vote, qualifying for the four-way general election.

Trump had previewed a possible lawsuit earlier in the week. On Truth Social, the president on Wednesday called the Senate race in Alaska “totally confusing” and slammed Dan J. Sullivan’s presence.

“We are looking at powerful legal options to remove the fraudulent Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. from the Ballot, and holding the Democrats accountable for their Election Interference, in the pursuit of Justice and Fairness,” Trump wrote.

Experts skeptical

Early expert reaction to the Justice Department’s complaint has been sharply critical. The complaint cites the preamble of the National Voter Registration Act, which says one of its purposes is “to protect the integrity of the electoral process.” 

Writing in Election Law Blog, Derek Muller, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame focused on elections, called the legal argument “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.”

“Some, in a panic, might react that the Department is trying to deny certification of an election in a state. Of course that’s what the Department is trying to do. But the legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” Muller wrote.

California noncitizen case appealed

In California, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Hamill filed a notice of appeal in the Justice Department’s lawsuit over alleged noncitizen voters just three days after the the DOJ requested a temporary restraining order to halt ballot counting for individuals on the list of 20,000. 

Hamill wrote that the DOJ was interpreting U.S. District Court Judge David Carter’s silence as a denial of its request. 

Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, had only taken on the case a day earlier and had set a hearing for Oct. 27. Earlier this year, he became the first federal judge in the country to rule against the Justice Department’s lawsuits attempting to force states to turn over sensitive voter data.

On Friday, the Justice Department filed a new motion asking Carter to block the ballot counting and requested a ruling by noon Pacific time. 

In that filing, Hamill wrote that “every minute” of ballot processing that occurs without setting aside ballots of suspected noncitizens dilutes the votes of U.S. citizens.

Case ‘exceedingly weak,’ critics say

Critics of the Justice Department’s actions argue the time crunch is largely of its own making. 

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted during a press call Thursday that the DOJ didn’t file its lawsuit until more than a week after California began mailing ballots — and then several more days to seek a temporary restraining order.

“I think this case is exceedingly weak,” said Becker, who worked as a senior trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Attorneys for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, and Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan have both asked Carter to dismiss the lawsuit. 

Logan’s legal team on Wednesday wrote that Los Angeles County hasn’t changed how it conducts elections. What’s changed, they wrote, was the federal government’s posture.

“Weeks before Election Day, the United States asks this Court to intrude on the administration of an election,” Logan’s lawyers wrote.

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.

The U.S. Department of Justice is intensifying its campaign against voter fraud with a spree of arrests in the final weeks before Election Day, an effort that voting rights advocates warn risks instilling fear among voters.

Over the past week, the Justice Department unveiled election-related criminal charges against 28 noncitizens in California and threatened state and local election officials with prosecutions. 

It’s now asking a federal judge to immediately order California election officials to not count the ballots of voters it suspects are noncitizens until their citizenship can be verified — citing the new wave of arrests as justification.

Federal prosecutors’ focus on alleged voter fraud comes as President Donald Trump stares down an increasingly dire political landscape in the midterm elections. 

As his approval ratings sag, Democrats are favored to retake the U.S. House and possibly the Senate, an outcome that would trigger a wave of congressional investigations into the president and his administration.

Feds and states

The Trump administration’s confrontation with California is quickly developing into a last-minute showdown over the limits of the federal authority in elections. 

The Justice Department failed to force states to turn over sensitive voter data and the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump’s plan to restrict voting by mail. The pressure on California marks a new front in the federal government’s push to assert influence over how elections are run, a responsibility assigned to the states by the U.S. Constitution.

“The Trump administration’s decision to launch a highly publicized federal sweep just two weeks before Election Day is the latest escalation in a coordinated campaign meant to sow fear and confusion amongst voters,” Jonathan Paik, executive director of OC Action, an Orange County, California, civics group, told reporters on Tuesday.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced the arrests of 11 noncitizens and criminal charges against 28 noncitizens in total in California. The DOJ said all 28 individuals are lawful permanent residents. 

The Los Angeles Times reported that some expressed confusion over the charges as they made their initial appearances in federal court in Los Angeles, saying they had no recollection of registering to vote.

The same day, the DOJ filed court papers asking a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order requiring California to not count ballots cast by roughly 20,000 registered voters that the department says are likely noncitizens unless they can confirm their citizenship. 

The request comes after the DOJ first sued California last week, after giving state and local officials 48 hours to investigate the names.

In the court documents, the DOJ says that without court action, a significant risk exists that American votes will be diluted. It notes that all 28 individuals charged were on the list of suspected noncitizen voters given to state officials.

“California is mailing ballots to noncitizens, and they are refusing to comply with federal law, which makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote. The voting rights of American citizens must be protected,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in California, said in a statement.

Election officials warned

The Justice Department recently raised the prospect that election officials who stand in its way could face prosecution. In a Friday letter to Los Angeles County, Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote that if people knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals “identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

While the DOJ’s actions appear concentrated in California, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Texas, said in a Monday statement that local election administrators have a duty to prevent illegal voting “and I’m here to make sure they do their job.”

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, predicted the Justice Department’s California lawsuit would fail. 

Becker, a former senior trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, said election officials are not committing crimes but he anticipates that the Trump administration may raise the “noise level” as Election Day approaches.

“I think there is just a lot of garbage being thrown at the wall because they don’t have any other tools left and they appear to have given up on persuading the electorate in this election,” Becker said on a press call Tuesday.

California election officials have begun to fight back in federal court. Lawyers for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat in court filings on Tuesday urged the court not to let the Justice Department effort proceed.

Weber’s lawyers argue that no barrier exists to the Justice Department enforcing federal prohibitions against noncitizen voting. They note that since August, the California Secretary of State’s office has received federal grand jury subpoenas for about 300 people. Monday’s arrests, they say, actually underscore that federal prosecutors can already work through existing rules and procedures to combat alleged fraud.

“At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt. At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election,” lawyers for Weber wrote.

In a declaration filed in court, Aman Bhullar, a high-ranking official in the Los Angeles County Assistant Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Information Technology Bureau, warned that the Justice Department’s request raised the possibility of a “catastrophic impact” to voting within the county, the most populous in the nation. 

The consequences, Bhullar wrote, range from halting all vote counting to halting the ability of voters to cast a ballot in person. 

Additionally, Bhullar wrote that his team had analyzed a sample of 200 of the 20,000 names provided by the DOJ. They found that nearly 43% had canceled voter registration records and that 86 of the 200 had been mailed a ballot — and that every voter not mailed a ballot had a canceled or inactive record. 

Of the 200 names analyzed, about 71% had never voted.

Dramatic voter fraud arrests

The Justice Department has said that the Department of Homeland Security identified the names after analyzing the state’s publicly available voter roll data and checked them against immigration records and other sources of federal information. Justice Department lawyers say Homeland Security didn’t use the SAVE system, a computer tool that can verify citizenship that Democrats and other critics say falsely flags U.S. citizens. 

DOJ lawyers are separately fighting with the watchdog groups Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over whether the actions in California violate a federal judge’s order in Washington, D.C., blocking the department’s efforts to obtain state voter roll data and feed it to Homeland Security.

Amid dueling court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department posted to social media a video montage of voter fraud arrests in California set to rock music. Several clips show Homeland Security Investigations agents in tactical gear leading away a handcuffed man who appears to be wearing red pajama bottoms.

Kevin Lainez, the mayor of Commerce, California, where one person was arrested in the Justice Department’s anti-voter fraud operation, told reporters on Tuesday that the charged individuals must go through the appropriate legal process.

“But let me be clear,” Lainez said. “The timing of the operation and the way it was run was nothing short of political theater.”

After the U.S. Department of Justice sued California over its refusal to remove voters the federal government alleges are noncitizens, voting rights advocates fear the Trump administration is violating a court order blocking it from rooting out noncitizens with states’ voter data.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Oct. 9 ruled against the Justice Department’s year-long project to obtain state’s unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data, and share them with the Department of Homeland Security to identify possible noncitizens. The DOJ on Friday said it plans to appeal the decision.

In letters sent on Oct. 13, the Justice Department gave California officials 48 hours to review and remove a list of some 20,000 registered voters that the Trump administration believes are noncitizens. 

Many are concentrated in the Los Angeles area, and state and local elections officials both refused to act on the list. The DOJ immediately sued after its deadline passed on Thursday.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit, coming less than three weeks before Election Day and with voting underway in California, amounts to the latest development in President Donald Trump’s efforts to assert authority over elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are administered by the states. Trump faces a deluge of investigations and pushback if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress in November.

Democrats and voting rights groups have previously raised alarms about the possibility of the Trump administration attempting to interfere with voting. For some, the legal action against California only exacerbates their concerns. 

Letter sent, hearing requested

On Thursday, several Democratic senators wrote to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to demand that the DOJ confirm it won’t seize ballots or other election materials.

The watchdog groups Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which represents voters who sued to block the DOJ’s voter data sharing, have asked Sooknanan to hold a hearing to look into whether the Trump administration’s actions violate her order. They said the DOJ has adopted an “exceedingly narrow view” of her decision.

“By attempting to superintend voter roll list maintenance and prohibit registered voters from exercising the franchise without adequate consideration of the reliability of the underlying data, DOJ’s October 13 letters and the actions described in the California (lawsuit) appear to implicate — and perhaps outright violate” Sooknanan’s order, lawyers for the groups wrote in a court filing.

On Friday, Sooknanan ordered the Justice Department to respond to the request for a hearing in District of Columbia federal court by Monday.

Email exchange

Common Cause and CREW filed in court a late Thursday email exchange with Christian Dibblee, a Justice Department trial attorney, in which Dibblee writes that Homeland Security obtained a publicly available voter roll of California voters — as opposed to the full, unredacted roll that DOJ has sued states over — and that DHS didn’t use the SAVE system to identify possible noncitizens. 

SAVE, a computer system operated by DHS, combs through government databases to verify citizenship, but critics point to examples of the program falsely flagging U.S. citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court in September ruled that states could continue accessing SAVE ahead of the midterm elections, but most states are currently prohibited from conducting mass purges of voters because it’s too close to the election.

Sooknanan’s order “does not extend to using other methods, nor does it prohibit taking enforcement actions based on those other methods,” Dibblee wrote, adding that Homeland Security also wasn’t a party to the lawsuit challenging the DOJ’s voter roll effort.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit against California offers a broad overview, but few specifics, of how Homeland Security compiled its list of suspected noncitizens. It says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, compares “information about voter rolls” with “its internal data” to identify possible noncitizens. Additional investigative steps, not described, are used to assign a confidence level — low, medium or high — to each match.

ICE then connects high confidence matches with an “alien number” and those individuals are compared against internal records regarding naturalization and parental citizenship. Records from the State Department and Social Security Administration are also reviewed, the DOJ says in its lawsuit.

Individuals that ICE still believes to be noncitizens are then sent to Homeland Security Investigations, a sub-agency of ICE, according to the Justice Department. HSI conducts an “analytical data enrichment process” before sending data to HSI criminal investigators in the field.

In a statement Friday, DHS said it uses multiple data sources, from both government and commercial third-party sources, to supplement public information.

Mullin slams ‘unlawful voting’ 

In a Thursday statement, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the number of alleged noncitizens registered to vote in California “completely unacceptable.” He said even one noncitizen vote cancels out the ballot of a U.S. citizen and undermines elections.

“DHS is committed to identifying unlawful voting, protecting the integrity of federal elections, and ensuring that only eligible American citizens elect America’s leaders,” Mullin said.

Democrats and voting rights experts have questioned the Justice Department’s decision to file the lawsuit with the election underway. The DOJ previously lost a lawsuit seeking to force California to turn over its unredacted voter roll — one of 23 similar lawsuits over state voter data that the Trump administration has lost.

The Trump administration’s efforts to identify large numbers of noncitizen voters have, up to this point, also fallen short of its own standards. Over the summer, the federal government claimed that California had upwards of 190,000 noncitizens on its voter roll. 

By contrast, Thursday’s lawsuit alleges only roughly 20,000 noncitizen voters — about 0.08% of the nearly 23.2 million registered voters in California.

DHS said Friday that 190,000 remains the number of potential noncitizen voters but that 20,000 represents a subset who have gone through a manual verification process so far.

“Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court.”

The Trump administration sought a federal court order Thursday to force California to purge 20,000 people from its voter rolls over claims they are not U.S. citizens, a major development less than three weeks before the midterm elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state, asking a judge to validate its claims that the state is willfully allowing noncitizens to vote in the Nov. 3 elections. California law requires that ballots have already been sent to registered voters.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan on Wednesday declined to open a thumb drive the federal government sent them containing a list of suspected noncitizens registered to vote in California. 

Logan said the drive was unvetted and opening it would violate the office’s security protocols. 

The Justice Department’s complaint said the refusal to open the drive was a major obstacle to enforcing federal voting laws.

“By sending ballots to likely noncitizens despite the Federal Government notifying California of serious concerns, Defendants (collectively, California) have made it nearly impossible for the United States to investigate and enforce federal law,” the suit said. “This is a substantial drain on federal resources. In addition, when aliens illegally vote in elections, they dilute the votes of citizens and unduly influence who runs the Federal Government. That also undermines public faith in federal elections.”

The suit seeks a judicial order blocking the state from counting mail ballots sent to registered voters that the administration says are noncitizens.

California sends ballots to every registered voter in every election without distinguishing among state, local or federal elections, the suit says. Ballots for this year’s general election went out Oct. 1. 

Only citizens can vote in state and federal elections. San Francisco allows noncitizens to vote in some local elections. 

In Thursday’s complaint, the administration said the Department of Homeland Security had identified 20,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote in California. The department warned California “months ago” that noncitizens may be registered to vote in the state, which “made no serious attempt to” determine if that was true, according to the suit.

Many of the people the administration says are noncitizens and registered to vote live in Los Angeles County, the suit says.

Representatives for Logan and Weber did not immediately return messages seeking comment Thursday.

Motivation questioned

The suit omits efforts by the state over the past few months to work with the federal government to identify noncitizens on its voter rolls, David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said on a press call Thursday afternoon.

The administration estimated several months ago that 190,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state. State officials asked for the federal government’s methodology and for the names of the individuals. They did not receive a response, Becker said.

Instead, the DOJ blindsided California and Los Angeles County with a letter demanding voter files be removed just weeks from Election Day, Becker said. 

Becker suggested that the administration’s objective was not to deny noncitizens from voting, but to sow doubt about the election results. If the DOJ had a “legitimate concern” and was operating in good faith, it would have worked diligently starting at the beginning of last year, he said.

“I don’t know what their motivation is, but I can tell you what their motivation isn’t, because if they were seeking to work in good faith to clean up the voter list that they believed had issues, they would have done this months ago in a much different fashion,” he said. 

“It does raise questions as to whether or not the sole purpose of this is to set the stage for false claims about election theft after an election that the president might be worried his party was going to do poorly in.”

He added that the thumb drive was sent in an envelope that included a handwritten note with a password written on it, which is a serious red flag for cybersecurity experts.

“I don’t know how much you’re aware of the cybersecurity protocols in election offices,” he said. “Election offices do not just stick thumb drives into their technology — for very good reason.”

WASHINGTON — Small businesses will once again challenge President Donald Trump’s tariffs in federal court this week as they continue to feel the squeeze of the administration’s roller coaster policy on import taxes.

Spice importer Burlap & Barrel and rare watch importer Collective Horology will argue Wednesday in the Court of International Trade in New York City that the Trump administration did not properly establish forced labor cases against dozens of U.S. trading partners before levying duties on goods that numerous American importers buy.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative announced in late July that products from 60 top U.S. trading partners will be tariffed at 10% or 12.5%, depending on whether governments have or have not developed laws meant to combat forced labor. The new tariffs cover 99.4% of all goods imported into the United States, according to the office.

The plaintiffs, represented by the legal advocacy nonprofit Liberty Justice Center, allege the administration exceeded its tariff authority delegated by Congress under the forced labor statute, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. 

The plaintiffs also argue the tariffs are “arbitrary and capricious” because U.S. trade officials relied on “generalized assertions” that labor policies in 60 economies imposed concrete economic harm to the U.S.

Trade law expert blasts Trump usage

Ambassador Alan Wm. Wolff, a former trade official who helped draft the forced labor statute and filed a brief in support of the small business plaintiffs, said Section 301 was “designed for sort of a rifle shot of retaliation against a single foreign country doing some particular act that’s been verified.”

Wolff served in the Carter and Ford administrations, and later as a deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization.

“I sat through the executive sessions of the committees that were drafting the statute,” he said. “No one ever conceived of the idea that you could just create a sort of a fake, bogus test for other countries – 60 of them — that none of them could meet.”

Wolff told States Newsroom in an interview Sept. 21 that the statute has never been used in this way.

“If the U.S. was serious about forced labor being dealt with in this fashion … it would say, ‘Well, we’ll review it every six months, and if you put in a statute that has the following provisions, we would probably lift the tariff,’” he said. 

“There’s none of that because the purpose is to have the tariff, not to combat forced labor,” he continued.

The Department of Justice declined to comment Monday on ongoing litigation.

The White House and the Office of the United States Trade Representative did not respond Monday.

One tariff after another

The legal challenge on behalf of small business plaintiffs is not the first one to be brought by the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit that focuses on “high-impact cases that defend individual liberty and challenge government overreach,” according to its website.

In February, the organization secured a victory against the Trump administration when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the president’s unprecedented executive tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, referred to as IEEPA, were unconstitutional.

The organization won the case on behalf of several small business plaintiffs, ranging from an Illinois-based toymaker and New York-based wine importer, to a Utah-based plastics producer and a Pennsylvania-based fishing gear company, among others.

Almost immediately after the high court struck down his emergency tariffs, Trump imposed a new wide-reaching 10% tariff on global imports under a separate statute – Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The statute limited Trump to only 150 days.

The administration concurrently opened sweeping trade practice investigations, including under the Section 301 forced labor statute, on nearly all U.S. trading partners. The government announced its forced labor findings just as the earlier tariffs expired at the 150-day mark.

New duties ‘blatantly pretextual’

Sara Albrecht, the Liberty Justice Center’s CEO, described the administration’s new forced labor tariffs as “blatantly pretextual” to replace duties imposed under Section 122.

“And Section 122 was pretextual for the IEEPA tariff that rolled off this year when he lost at the Supreme Court. So we feel like our job wasn’t done because we struck down the IEEPA tariff, and then the administration just did it again,” Albrecht said.

The organization is again representing small business plaintiffs who allege harm to their bottom line because of the administration’s tariff policy. 

Burlap & Barrel, a New York-based company with warehouses in Hagerstown, Maryland, and Las Vegas imports spices from 22 countries. The California-based Collective Horology imports high-end mechanical watches from independent makers in six European nations.

“They are two individual American small businesses that have been swept up in a political kind of debate. We’re arguing this on behalf of every American small business, every American business that is being forced to once again pay illegal tariffs,” Albrecht said.

The organization has asked the Court of International Trade for class status.

“You have to keep in mind that they’re just getting their IEEPA refunds right now, and we’re almost done with that. But they had to start paying Section 122 (tariffs), and then when that stopped, they had to pay Section 301 (tariffs). So a lot of these businesses are effectively loaning all of their working capital to the U.S. government while we kind of sort this out in court,” Albrecht said.

The Liberty Justice Center had also challenged the Section 122 tariffs on behalf of Burlap & Barrel.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is still in the process of refunding roughly $166 billion worth of tariffs paid by businesses under Trump’s IEEPA import charges.

“We’re a small nonprofit that is, you know, 12 attorneys trying to again strike down the tariffs, and it would be nice if someone else wanted to jump into the fight,” Albrecht said. “So we’re doing the best we can, and I think we’ve done a good job so far.”

Prior to the tariff case win, the organization was most well known for its role in successfully arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME, in which its client Mark Janus challenged public sector unions over paying dues.

WASHINGTON — The three news organizations that President Donald Trump barred from entering the White House grounds earlier this month have asked a federal judge to ensure their reporters continue to have access after a temporary restraining order expires in early October. 

Attorneys for CNN, MS Now and Politico filed paperwork late Monday requesting a preliminary injunction from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that without it the administration is likely to again revoke press passes for journalists at those news organizations and possibly others. 

“The President has stated that there will be ‘Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,’ … leaving other news organizations covering the White House to face the prospect that their access may likewise depend on the President’s view of their coverage,” the brief states. “And each day the ban remains in effect, the public loses access to essential reporting on the President and his administration.”

Trump announced on Sept. 18 that he planned to prevent reporters from CNN, MS Now and Politico from reporting on White House grounds. Those news organizations filed a lawsuit a few days later, after several of their reporters were denied entry at a security checkpoint and had their press passes confiscated by Secret Service officers. 

District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who was nominated during Trump’s first term, issued a temporary restraining order on Sept. 23, requiring the White House to return the press passes and allow the journalists it had barred back in. 

That order expires Oct. 8, but could be replaced by a preliminary injunction if the judge agrees with the request filed by the three news organizations this week. 

That 49-page brief argues the president’s ban retaliated against the news organizations “for engaging in speech, publication, and newsgathering activities that the First Amendment protects but the administration disfavors.”

The attorneys representing the journalists wrote that Trump administration officials claiming the ban was related to national security concerns were “not credible.” 

They later wrote that “the President’s own words leave no doubt that banning Plaintiffs from the White House and denying them the access they had as of September 18 is retaliation for their protected newsgathering and speech—adverse action intended to cow them into conforming the content of their reporting to the President’s preferences and to threaten other journalists lest they suffer the same fate. That is a paradigmatic First Amendment violation.” 

The administration’s response brief is due Friday.

Imagine sitting at a red light when suddenly and without warning, your car accelerates on its own. In fact, it does so at such a pace that it “bursts” its own tires and then fights back when you attempt to take control. That’s what one family in Washington alleges happened with their Tesla Model X. The incident is at the heart of a new lawsuit, and only data from the car may be able to prove or disprove the claim.

As KING 5 reports, Linh Nguyen was stopped at the intersection of 144th Street Northeast and 124th Avenue Northeast in Kirkland on June 29, 2023. His then-14-year-old daughter was riding with him. The complaint alleges that their 2023 Model X suddenly accelerated into the intersection, then struck a curb. Thankfully, no other vehicle was hit.

Read: Another Tesla Crash, Another Owner Says It ‘Drove On Its Own’

According to Nguyen, he sustained injuries to his neck, back, shoulder, knees, and left side, while suffering from dizziness and confusion. The complaint says his daughter was injured too, and suffered severe emotional distress. The family is seeking damages from Tesla, including compensation for medical treatment and other losses.

The lawsuit points to Autopilot, alleging the system failed to keep the SUV stopped, accelerated without Nguyen’s input, and prevented him from regaining control by braking or steering.

Nguyen also says he paid roughly $15,000 extra for the technology, which brings up another question. Tesla has never required that type of payment for Autopilot. On the other hand, it has indeed priced its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech suite at that figure. So to that end, we’re left wondering what system Nguyen alleges created the crash. That said, the allegations here aren’t without precedent.

More: Tesla’s Self-Driving Feature Just Became A Monthly Bill For Everyone

After investigating a fatal 2018 Model X crash in California, the NTSB concluded that Autopilot steered the SUV into a highway gore area. The board also cited the driver’s failure to respond. Obviously, swerving into a lane while moving is quite different from what sounds like a car attempting its own 0-60 test without warning. That’s where the vehicle logs and event data could prove either vindicating or damning.

The public account doesn’t include data like accelerator position, brake application, speed, steering input, and the status of its assistance systems. Each of those would say a lot about what went down.

In an earlier review of Tesla sudden-acceleration complaints, NHTSA analyzed crash data from 118 incidents. It found that the crashes for which event data was available were caused by pedal misapplication, with no evidence of a vehicle fault or ineffective brakes in those cases. Until the data comes out, plenty of folks could assume this is another similar case.

Photos: Tesla

WASHINGTON — An appeals panel Friday seemed inclined to agree that more than 100 Venezuelan men the Trump administration sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador are entitled to due process hearings to challenge their removal, which was made under an archaic 18th-century wartime law. 

Arguing on behalf of the class of men who were removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union told the three-judge panel that the men, who were accused of being suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, were entitled to hearings to challenge those accusations. 

But instead, Gelernt said, the men were denied their due process rights and spent four months in a brutal Salvadoran prison. 

The men were eventually returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap exchange, but many who had pending asylum cases want to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act and continue their immigration proceedings.

He said the Trump administration is asking for the ability to “essentially whisk people away to a foreign prison, give them no opportunity to contest the removal, even whether they’re part of this gang that this proclamation applies to… and then say, ‘Because we got them out of the country into a foreign prison, that’s the end of the matter.’” 

DOJ argues against due process

The Trump administration argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the Venezuelan men are not entitled to due process hearings.

Department of Justice attorney Tiberius Davis said that the United States had no custody over the 137 Venezuelan men removed to the Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT, and therefore the immigrants are not entitled to hearings in the U.S. 

He added that it would be impractical for the Trump administration to conduct more than 100 online hearings abroad. 

“It’s a real problem with foreign sovereignty to hold hearings, and take evidentiary hearings, in foreign countries, even at our own embassies,” Davis said. “That can be a real problem. So we would have to engage in diplomacy and foreign affairs in order to even do that much.”

March 2025 origins

The case began when President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March 2025 to rapidly deport Venezuelan immigrants. 

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued the Trump administration an order to return several deportation planes to the U.S., but instead they landed at CECOT. The U.S. paid El Salvador up to $6 million to detain the men.

On Monday, there is a separate hearing where Boasberg will hear arguments as to whether several Trump officials should be held in contempt for violating his order by not returning the planes carrying men removed under the Alien Enemies Act, including possible criminal contempt charges against Attorney General Todd Blanche and an appellate judge, Emil Bove. 

Judge expresses doubt

Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments that the U.S. had no custody over the men while at CECOT. Edwards was appointed by former President Jimmy Carter. 

“It seems pretty clear … that the U.S. was fully engaged and kept itself in a position of control throughout,” Edwards said.

Davis disagreed and said that diplomacy was involved and pointed to how Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to engage with El Salvador’s president to bring back one of the men sent to CECOT, Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was unlawfully removed to his home country.

“I think the district court sort of swept away those foreign affairs concerns,” Davis said.  

Gelernt said it was harder to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia because he was a citizen of El Salvador. 

“He’s not part of our class. El Salvador clearly had an interest in their own nationals,” Gelernt said. “They have no interest in these Venezuelans, other than collecting a paycheck.”

A trial involving Tesla has just started in California, some four years after the electric car manufacturer was sued by the California Civil Rights Department for allegedly allowing racial discrimination against black workers at its Fremont factory.

Rather than a typical jury trial, state Superior Court Judge Peter Borkon ordered a bench trial. This means that he alone will determine if Tesla violated local civil rights laws, rather than a jury made up of members of the public.

Read: Tesla Settles Potentially Costly Lawsuit Over Autopilot Death

The lawsuit, filed in February 2022, asserted that Black workers at the company’s site in Fremont, California, have been segregated to the lowest level of the workforce and “discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion.” It has also been alleged that Tesla has turned a blind eye to years of complaints from Black workers who’ve had to endure racial slurs and seen racist writing and graffiti in common areas, including swastikas and other hate symbols.

The director of the California Civil Rights Department says the agency wants to hold Tesla accountable. Tesla has vehemently denied the accusations and, in late 2022, countersued the agency, alleging it had violated laws by filing the suit without seeking public comment or giving the car manufacturer time to settle.

California does not have a cap on the damages that a court can award to workers affected by workplace discrimination, so if Judge Borkon rules for the plaintiffs, Tesla may be forced to cough up a serious amount of money.

This isn’t the only lawsuit that Tesla is dealing with, related to the Fremont factory. In 2023, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against Tesla in federal court, also alleging that starting in 2015, Black employees had been subjected to racial slurs. This separate lawsuit also claims Tesla has failed to investigate complaints of racial conduct and even fired or retaliated against those workers who reported being harassed.

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 — A federal appeals court Friday struck down the Trump administration’s policy to quickly send noncitizens to countries they are not from, finding that immigrants must have an opportunity to challenge their removal if they fear for their safety.

The decision largely upheld a Boston federal judge’s February ruling that found the Department of Homeland Security’s policy unlawful. But the immigration officers can still conduct third-country removals if they follow the proper procedures, such as adequate notice and an opportunity for an immigrant to raise a fear-based claim to that country of removal.

Third-country removals, deportations from the United States to a nation other than an immigrant’s home country, occur when the immigrant’s home country does not accept the person’s repatriation. 

Once rare, the procedure has spiked under the second Trump administration that has entered into partnerships with several countries, some with human rights concerns, to take third-country removals from the U.S.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit also raised doubts that a country that accepts a person that is not their own citizen could “credibly provide blanket assurances that all removed noncitizens will not be persecuted or tortured there unless it intends to provide them with some sort of affirmative protection against rogue agents and non-state actors.” 

The panel also upheld the lower court’s finding that the notice to a third country was inadequate – about 24 hours – and that the policy was unlawful.

It gives “no notice at all of an impending third-country removal when the country to which the noncitizen is to be removed has provided credible (in the State Department’s judgment) diplomatic assurances that noncitizens removed there from the United States will not be persecuted or tortured,” the panel wrote.

The panel included circuit judges Lara E. Montecalvo, Jeffrey R. Howard and Seth R. Aframe. Former President Joe Biden nominated Montecalvo and Aframe. Former President George W. Bush nominated Howard.

The Trump administration in May 2025 made an emergency request to the Supreme Court after U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy blocked the policy. The Supreme Court in June 2025 temporarily allowed for the removals, before sending it back to the lower court. 

Murphy again in February issued an order that blocked the policy and required DHS to carry out the statutory obligations of proper notice of removal to a third country and to give a noncitizen enough time to raise any concerns for their safety to their removal to a third country. 

The Trump administration later appealed to the First Circuit, and could appeal again to the Supreme Court. 

DHS did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment Friday. 

Lawsuits that turn into jury trials can be costly, and likely to avoid a potentially astronomical payout, Tesla has settled a lawsuit filed in relation to the death of a 31-year-old killed while driving a Model S with Autopilot enabled. As you may expect, details about the settlement remain confidential.

On February 18, 2023, Genesis Giovanni Mendoza Martinez was driving his 2014 Tesla Model S on Interstate 680 in Contra Costa County, California, when the EV slammed into a fire truck responding to an earlier accident. Martinez was killed in the 70-mph crash, while his brother in the passenger seat suffered serious injuries.

Read: NHTSA Suspects Tesla That Hit Firetruck In Fatal Crash Was Using Autopilot

The lawsuit took issue with how Tesla advertised its Autopilot system, and suggested that the 31-year-old would not have been killed had the system performed as advertised. The lawsuit alleged that both Tesla and company boss Elon Musk had misrepresented the capabilities of the Level 2 driver-assistance system, causing Martinez to place too much trust in it.

The case was being overseen by Judge Vince Chhabria, who determined last year that the ‘Autopilot’ name was “plausibly misleading.” He also ruled that Musk’s statements about Autopilot, including statements in which he said it was “probably better” than a human driver, were legally actionable.

Did Tesla Make False Promises?

Contra Costa Fire Department/X

Data recovered from the wrecked Model S revealed that Autopilot had been engaged roughly 12 minutes before the crash. Because of advertising around the technology, the lawsuit said the driver thought the EV “would drive itself and he no longer needed to drive it.”

Tesla fiercely contested the claims, saying it wasn’t at fault given that Martinez had ignored warnings in the owner’s manual and active warnings while inside the vehicle. Despite this, the judge cleared the path for a jury trial where Musk’s statements on Autopilot would have inevitably been put under the microscope. To avoid this, Tesla has agreed to settle.

The automaker has settled numerous similar lawsuits in the past. In 2025, it opted against settling a case in Florida, and a jury returned a verdict that it must pay $243 million in damages in relation to the 2019 death of a man who was inside a Model S with Autopilot engaged, which hit a parked Chevrolet Tahoe.

States, cities and counties filed a pair of lawsuits Monday challenging new federal rules that will allow immigrants’ use of safety net resources to be taken into account for green cards and other applications to stay in or enter the country.

The new federal policy goes into effect Friday and broadens the discretion of immigration officers reviewing applications for green cards, certain visas or admissions into the U.S., allowing officers to consider enrollment in public benefits, such as housing and food assistance, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as something called “public charge.” 

When officers determine a person could become dependent on government benefits, that “public charge” is a ground for inadmissibility under federal law. Such non-cash benefits were previously restricted from public charge consideration under the Biden administration. 

The Trump administration rescinded that 2022 policy, arguing that it is protecting taxpayer dollars and expects immigrants to be self-sufficient.

Both lawsuits were filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. 

Many mixed-status households are expected to forgo benefits and disenroll from programs, causing U.S. citizen dependents, including children, to lose care and benefits for which they’re legally entitled to receive, experts and state officials say.

In their lawsuit, 22 states and the District of Columbia pointed to DHS estimates that say states nationwide may lose roughly $4.05 billion in annual federal transfer payments for Medicaid and CHIP programs alone. Of that nationwide total, the plaintiffs may stand to lose about $2.2 billion in reduced federal payments. 

The states include Colorado, Connecticut, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Due to disenrollments, states nationwide could lose about $1 billion in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Of that, the plaintiff states could lose $575 million in reduced federal payments.

The states argue that the new rules contain many ambiguities and will cause the states to“ultimately be forced to fill the breach” by funding gaps out of their own budgets, leading to “staggering” costs.

Along with losing federal funding due to disenrollments from state programs, public agencies will face administrative costs, the states argue, and as households forgo enrolling in benefits, such as preventative healthcare and nutritional assistance, including school lunches, public health will suffer, leading to an increase in disease prevalence and driving up the costs of medical care, they argue.

In a separate lawsuit, a coalition of cities and counties — New York City; Chicago; San Francisco; Santa Clara County, California; Seattle and King County, Washington — say the new rule is unlawful in reversing “longstanding limits on public charge determinations.” Roughly 1.3 million people, including 600,000 children, could lose care and coverage in those places, the suit argues.

New York City, which led the cities’ lawsuit, estimates it would see 6,000 fewer annual primary care visits. 

“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani said in a news release. “New Yorkers will be afraid to see a doctor or ask for help they are legally entitled to. That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting. Families who remain fully eligible for benefits will feel a chilling effect and all New Yorkers will pay for it.”

The coalition also argues that children would be forced to withdraw from free or low-cost education programs. It notes that about 19% of Seattle residents and 26% of King County residents rely on such programs.

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

WASHINGTON — Latino advocacy groups and voting rights organizations Thursday filed a suit in federal court challenging the Trump administration’s policy of allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement during the 2026 midterm elections. 

The suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia argues that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s recent comments that ICE agents would be at polling locations for the purpose of immigration enforcement violates federal law that prohibits federal “armed men” at election sites. 

The statute allows for “troops” or “armed men” at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” 

“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” according to the lawsuit. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal immigration enforcement officers if they choose to cast a ballot.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a DHS spokesperson said that “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations.” 

“ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action,” the spokesperson said. 

Earlier this month, Mullin said that ICE officers at polling locations would be there “to enforce specific threats.” 

“The only reason why we would be at polling places, if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration (and) custom enforcement. That’s their job and so if we’re doing something, we’re doing that specifically.”

The suit asks the federal court to prevent the Trump administration from following that polling place policy and declaring it unlawful, as well as barring “officers from operating or carrying weapons in the vicinity of open polling places, including dropboxes, curbside voting locations, and similar places where votes are taken, collected, received, counted, or certified during early voting periods and on Election Day itself, for any reason other than repelling armed enemies of the United States.”

The civil rights groups that joined the suit said the tactic would lead to voter suppression.

“Sending armed ICE officers to polling places is not immigration enforcement — it is voter suppression, plain and simple,” UnidosUS President Janet Murguía said in a statement. “All Americans — including Latino voters  — have a constitutional right to cast their ballot without fear of interrogation, detention, or family separation.”

The suit was filed by the oldest U.S. Latino civil rights organization, League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; the largest Hispanic civil rights organization, UnidosUS; the voter mobilization group Common Cause; and the city and county of Denver, Colorado, which has a large immigrant population and has been targeted by ICE multiple times for immigration enforcement. 

“The right to vote, and to do so without fear of intimidation, is fundamental to our democracy and to being an American,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement. “Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes. We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”

A coalition of state attorneys general filed a pair of lawsuits Wednesday challenging the Trump administration’s rollbacks of protections for endangered species. 

The lawsuits, filed by 20 states and the District of Columbia, seek to reinstate rules that protect the habitat that endangered species depend on to survive. 

Under President Donald Trump, federal agencies have changed their interpretation of “harm” under the endangered species law to include only actions that directly injure or kill animals. For decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies had taken a broader position that the law also banned the destruction of forests, streams and wetlands that those animals depend on for nesting, mating and raising young. 

“The federal government’s attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act threatens the habitats of orcas, sockeye salmon, and other endangered species that are part of our economy, culture, and way of life,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, said in a news release. 

A second lawsuit challenges a pair of new rules that change the process for federal wildlife officials to designate “critical habitat.” The rules reduce protections for newly listed threatened species and make it easier for officials to decline to list certain lands as critical. 

“For over half a century, the (Endangered Species Act) has stood as a bipartisan example of what it means to protect an irreplaceable part of our planet, but these new rules attempt to destroy longstanding and integral regulatory protections and open the door to further species decline and possible extinctions,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said in a statement. 

The lawsuits argue that the rollbacks enacted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service violate two key federal laws, the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. According to Bonta’s press release, the rules ignore not just the purpose and history of the Endangered Species Act but also numerous court rulings and the law’s “overall precautionary approach.”

The lawsuits are led by Brown and Bonta, along with the attorneys general of Maryland and Massachusetts. The suits were also joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin. 

The lawsuits were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

In a statement, the Department of the Interior vowed to “vigorously defend its authority” to manage endangered species under the new guidelines.

“This lawsuit seeks to preserve a decades-old regulatory overreach that expanded the Endangered Species Act beyond the authority granted by Congress,” the agency said, according to Reuters. 

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

Gov. Tony Evers is taking his final back-to-school tour of the state, visiting K-12 classrooms across Wisconsin to meet students, families and staff and tout his record as the “Education Governor.”

If you don’t happen to live in one of the 72 Wisconsin school districts that went to referendum last spring, begging local property taxpayers to cover basic costs the state is not meeting, you might get the impression from Evers’ valedictory tour that he is leaving office having solved the urgent problem of chronic underfunding of Wisconsin schools. 

“After a decade of disinvestment, Gov. Evers has spent the last almost eight years working to invest in public education at every level,” a statement released this week by the governor’s office declares. “During his time in office, Gov. Evers has enacted budgets to restore two-thirds funding for public schools for the first time in over two decades, provide the largest special education aid increase in state history, and bring per pupil aid to its highest level ever.”

Sounds like a strong record of accomplishment!

But wait, why does a lawsuit filed this year by the Wisconsin PTA, students, parents, teachers and communities across the state charge that Wisconsin “has seemingly abandoned its commitment to the education of Wisconsin’s public school children” and is violating its own constitution by failing to adequately fund public schools? 

The short answer is that Evers, along with the Republican legislative leaders who are the targets of the lawsuit, are using misleading language to pass off austerity for schools as generosity.

Take Evers’ claim about restoring the state’s long-abandoned commitment to two-thirds funding for schools. That two-thirds number is based on counting money in the state budget that schools are not allowed to spend. While the money is technically allocated for education, the state did not lift school revenue caps, so it can only be spent for property-tax relief. 

“Meeting the state’s two-thirds funding commitment doesn’t put a single new pencil in a classroom when you provide zero dollars in new spending,” explains Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, “and the current budget provided zero dollars in new spendable aid for both years of this biennium.”

Far from reaping a historic investment, students and teachers are starting the year in Wisconsin with no new money for schools. 

The state’s share of special education funding, which fell from a high of 70% in the 1970s to hover around 30% in recent years, did get a bump in the last budget, reversing a dire drop-off. But the “largest special education increase in state history” only amounted to a jump from 30 to 35% last year — considerably less than the 42% reimbursement rate state officials originally projected. 

Finally, in a sense, Evers did bring per-pupil aid to its highest level ever, but like his other claims, this is more a rhetorical victory than a concrete benefit to schools. Using his line-item veto, Evers extended school districts’ ability to raise $325 in revenue per pupil from local taxpayers for the next 400 years. This move infuriated Republicans, and they used it as a reason for not giving schools any new money in the current budget. But the $325 per pupil increase is not hard cash, it’s just revenue-raising authority granted to districts, which are allowed to raise property taxes by that amount if they choose to. Some, having exhausted the good will of local taxpayers with repeated referendum asks, have not done so. 

All in all, schools in Wisconsin are in bad financial shape, and property taxpayers are weary of filling the gap left by the state abandoning its obligation to kids. 

“The Legislature is selling kids short,” says Jeff Mandell of Law Forward, which is representing the plaintiffs in the school funding lawsuit. The Wisconsin Constitution guarantees every child an equal opportunity for a sound, basic education. But for years, the plaintiffs argue, the state has been breaking that promise.

Adams-Friendship school district, one of the parties in the lawsuit, used to have five elementary schools within its 500 square miles. Now, because of school closures due to low enrollment and shrinking budgets, it has only one K-12 school. Kids spend hours riding the bus to a single school building with aging infrastructure where many classrooms are unusable on hot days. 

Huge challenges are also facing urban districts. In Beloit last year one in eight students was homeless. 

“There is this fictitious idea that everyone has budgets, the schools just have to tighten their belts,” says Mandell. The reality is, even as the challenges schools face pile up, the state has steadily decreased funding, to the point where many now face an existential crisis.

The current lawsuit is not the first challenge to Wisconsin’s school funding formula based on the idea that the state is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide a basic, free education to all children. 

Back in 2000, a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a similar argument in the Vincent v. Voight case. 

In that case, “the Court said the system is not bad enough right now to violate the constitution,” Mandell says. But since then, two full generations of kids have completed kindergarten through 12th grade, and conditions have deteriorated dramatically.

When Vincent v. Voight was decided, school revenue limits were still automatically pegged to inflation. A state law, abolished in 2003, still held that two-thirds of school funding should come from the state.  A popular program, abolished in 2018, still kept class sizes small and offered extra supports to children living in poverty to help them succeed academically.  Overall, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, school funding has not kept pace with inflation in Wisconsin since 2009, a major reversal from the early 2000s, when Wisconsin schools were among the best funded in the nation. 

“The situation keeps getting worse and worse and worse, and we’re saying the court needs to give this another look,” says Mandell.

This is where the hopeful part comes in. Like the gerrymandering lawsuit that prompted the Legislature and the governor to pass fair voting maps in Wisconsin, Mandell believes the school funding lawsuit could trigger major legislative reform. As in the gerrymandering case, “the court’s job is to tell the Legislature, ‘What you have here is not good enough,’ and then give them a short window to fix it,” Mandell says.

It’s not the court’s job to come up with a new funding formula, but if the governor and the Legislature can’t agree, it could impose its own solution.

As the November elections approach, ushering in a new Legislature and a new governor, there’s a real opportunity for change. 

“There is growing momentum and understanding of what the problem is, and what the issue is, on both sides of the aisle,” says DuBois Bourenane. 

She and the other public school advocates in her organization are deeply disappointed that the governor and the Legislature failed to hammer out a deal to give more money to schools, after dangling the idea at the end of the last session. “It’s just criminal that they’re even willing to entertain the idea of sending these kids back to school with nothing again,” she says. “We’ve got 70-plus districts going to referendum again this fall … over a third of our districts went to referendum this calendar year.” 

DuBois Bourenane agrees with Mandell that the lawsuit could spur a breakthrough. 

“I’m just glad that everybody’s talking about it,” she says, “and I hope that they’re paying very close attention to what’s actually possible if we elect people who all agree that we have to fix this broken problem.”