A federal judge in California has ordered limits on Homeland Security operations targeting non-citizen voters, ruling that the government’s use of unreliable data and highly publicised arrests could intimidate citizens from exercising their voting rights.
US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín barred Department of Homeland Security officers in nine states from carrying out field operations against people they know, suspect, or should reasonably suspect are US citizens.
The order also prevents officers from acting solely on matching data compiled by US Citizenship and Immigration Services without further investigation. It is due to take effect on Friday and remain in force through election night, although the federal government could appeal.
Homeland Security Investigations officers have visited homes and interviewed people suspected of illegally voting as non-citizens. Those identified by the operation can include people who later became US citizens but are accused of voting before they were naturalised.
In a 19-page ruling, Judge Martínez-Olguín said the initiative likely breached provisions of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit voter intimidation. She cited an alleged rushed effort to match government records and create a list of potential non-citizens on voter rolls.
A whistleblower at USCIS disclosed last month that the list included US citizens, the judge said. She also referred to HSI social media posts, including one showing agents handcuffing a California man accused of unlawfully registering to vote.
The judge wrote that the combination of incomplete data and prominent arrests could create “an objectively reasonable fear of law enforcement entanglements that intimidates citizens from urging or aiding others in exercising their right to vote”.
The planned operations covered California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
USCIS official Nicolas Bartell told the court that staff manually reviewed records before referring them to HSI. However, he acknowledged a “low possibility” that citizens could be wrongly identified as potential non-citizens in federal records.
Mr Bartell said safeguards were in place and argued that any remaining risks were outweighed by the need to support the government’s law-enforcement and election-integrity mission.
DHS said it remained focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing non-citizens who vote, adding: “We have no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be US citizens.”
The ruling followed a lawsuit brought by a coalition including San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, the city of San Francisco, nursing unions and the Voto Latino Foundation. Protect Democracy and the National Immigration Law Centre are representing the coalition against DHS and the Department of Justice.
Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, said the decision affirmed that citizens, whether born in the US or naturalised, should be able to vote “without armed government agents harassing them”.
A court filing by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United said some naturalised-citizen members no longer wanted to attend political rallies, become election workers or vote in person because of the federal operations.
The case comes as the Justice Department sues California and seeks to have 20,000 ballots segregated from people federal officials believe are “likely” to be non-citizens. A preliminary review by Los Angeles County election officials found that many registrations on the list had been cancelled, were inactive or had no voting history, while some belonged to people who said they were born in the US.
States’ reviews and audits have consistently found that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. The Justice Department announced charges on Monday against 28 green-card holders in California accused of illegally voting or registering to vote.
