Judge Halts Trump Admin's Noncitizen Voter Lists Before Midterms

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a temporary order on Monday that stops the Trump administration from proceeding with a plan to identify noncitizen voters in state records.

The ruling prevents the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security from transmitting lists of registered voters to state officials. These lists contain individuals the administration believes are not citizens. The order also bars federal agencies from asking state election boards to separate or withhold ballots from those specific voters until citizenship is verified.

The legal conflict centers on a pressure campaign launched over the past month. The administration sent letters to election officials in California and Washington state. Those letters demanded that states not count ballots from people included on the federal lists. In response, voting rights and privacy advocates filed a suit in Washington, DC. They argued the administration was violating the Privacy Act of 1974 by disclosing sensitive private information.

Judge Chutkan, an Obama appointee based in Washington, DC, focused her decision on the reliability of the government's data. She stated there was a risk that lawfully registered voters would be disenfranchised if the lists were inaccurate. An appeals court rejected the Justice Department's request for an emergency order on Friday, paving the way for this temporary bar to take effect.

The Justice Department argued in a Saturday filing that its letters were simply an effort to enforce a federal law banning noncitizen voting. The department maintained that these actions did not constitute a distinct policy subject to federal court review. However, Chutkan allowed the case to move forward in her jurisdiction.

This setback is part of a series of legal challenges facing the president's push for federal control over election administration ahead of the November 3 midterms. Republicans are currently fighting to keep their majorities in both houses of Congress. The administration did win a separate legal battle on Monday. A panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco allowed the government to threaten state and local officials with prosecution if they ignored federal demands regarding noncitizen voting. Chutkan is not bound by that 9th Circuit ruling.

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Los Angeles denied the Justice Department's request to set aside more than 20,000 mailed ballots in California. The department had claimed those voters were likely not citizens. A different judge in San Francisco also ordered the department to stop threatening election officials with prosecution on Friday.