Federal Judge Curbs DHS Voter Crackdown in Nine States Days Before Election

A federal judge in San Francisco has barred Department of Homeland Security agents from carrying out door-to-door "voter eligibility" investigations in nine states, finding that a crackdown built on unverified data likely amounted to voter intimidation in the final stretch of early voting before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California issued the preliminary injunction Wednesday in California Nurses Association v. Mullin, a suit filed in September by labor and voting-rights groups against DHS and Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The order took effect Friday evening, after the court gave the government two days to seek an emergency stay, and it bars field interviews and home visits directed at people DHS has no reasonable basis to believe are noncitizens. It expires automatically once polls close on Election Day.

The ruling does not stop DHS from investigating people it has a genuine basis to suspect are ineligible. What it halts is the broader sweep known inside the agency as the "Unlawful Voter Initiative," which has sent agents to question voters and, in some cases, visit homes in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

From 250,000 claims to zero

The case grew out of a DHS campaign that began over the summer, when Mullin sent letters to the secretaries of state of California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania warning that a department data match had flagged more than a quarter-million potentially ineligible voters: 190,832 in California alone, plus 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar called the figure "wildly speculative at best" and demanded DHS disclose its methodology. In a later private briefing with state officials, DHS cut its Nevada estimate first to 185 "potential" cases and then, after state election records were checked against it, to zero.

The plaintiffs — the California Nurses Association, National Nurses United, the city and county governments of San Francisco and Santa Clara, and the voter-outreach group Voto Latino Foundation — told the court the program had moved from warning letters to agents showing up at people's homes during active early voting, relying on data the government's own retractions had already shown to be unreliable. A whistleblower account shared with Senate Democrats alleged that officers assigned to the initiative were held to a quota of at least 40 "subject reviews" a day, leaving roughly 12 minutes per case, and were directed to look up voters on state election websites in ways that may have run afoul of state law.

In her order, Judge Martínez-Olguín found that the campaign, unfolding as ballots were already being cast, amounted to what she described as:

"ongoing intimidation" causing "irreparable harm" to eligible voters — concluding that "the public's interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation" outweighed the government's interest in pursuing unlawful noncitizen voting through these methods.

A rocky tenure for Mullin

The ruling lands at a delicate moment for Mullin, who took over DHS in March after President Trump dismissed Kristi Noem amid backlash over the administration's deportation operations. Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator and enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, made unverified claims of noncitizen voting an early signature issue, at one point warning state election officials they could face fines or prosecution for declining DHS data requests.

Those warnings have drawn pushback well beyond this lawsuit. In a letter reported September 29, more than two dozen Senate Democrats — including Gary Peters, Chuck Schumer, Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin and Catherine Cortez Masto — told Mullin his department risked undermining "the Constitutional authority of both Congress and states to administer elections" and pressed him to produce evidence behind his noncitizen-voter figures. In California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber has separately clashed with the Justice Department over a related demand for a list of people the federal government believes are likely noncitizens, a request her office says arrived with a 48-hour deadline and was ultimately delivered to Los Angeles County on a thumb drive rather than to her office, according to a statement her office issued on Oct. 14.

DHS disputes the characterization that it is trying to wrest control of elections away from the states, which the Constitution assigns primarily to state governments. A department spokesperson has called that claim "totally false" and said agents are not being deployed to polling places. The agency maintains that some noncitizens have in fact voted in recent elections — Mullin has publicly cited cases in Kansas and Louisiana — and argues federal data-matching is a legitimate tool for finding them, even as outside researchers continue to find confirmed instances of noncitizen voting to be exceedingly rare.

Who the order protects, and its limits

Naturalized citizens are the group most exposed to the kind of errors the court flagged, since federal databases used for the matching have a documented history of flagging people who became citizens after their records were created. Voto Latino's involvement as a plaintiff reflects a related concern: Latino voters, who are disproportionately likely to be recently naturalized, have made up a large share of the names on DHS's disputed lists in states like Nevada and California. The nurses' unions that brought the suit alongside them say their own members and patients were among those contacted.

The injunction does not touch DHS's authority to pursue individual noncitizen-voting cases where it has specific, reliable evidence, nor does it resolve the suit's broader claims, which include allegations that the initiative violates Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act's ban on voter intimidation, the Fifth Amendment right to vote and the Administrative Procedure Act's limits on arbitrary agency action. Those claims proceed toward a fuller hearing even as the preliminary order governs DHS's conduct through Election Day.

What's next

The delayed effective date gave the government until Friday evening to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to pause the order; court filings reviewed by reporters had not shown, as of Friday, whether DHS had sought that emergency relief. The case joins a crowded docket of election-season litigation against the administration, including a separate Justice Department suit against California and Los Angeles County over ballots the government alleges were cast by noncitizens, and continuing fights over a mail-voting executive order that courts have repeatedly narrowed. For now, voters in the nine affected states head into the last ten days before polls close with DHS's door-to-door initiative on hold — a pause set, by the terms of Judge Martínez-Olguín's own order, to lift the moment counting is done.