Judge orders Homeland Security to stop door-knocking citizens in its noncitizen voter hunt in 9 states

A federal judge has told the Department of Homeland Security to stop sending agents to the homes of people it has reason to believe are U.S. citizens as part of its hunt for noncitizen voters. The order covers nine states and runs until the polls close on Election Day, Nov. 3.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued the 19-page ruling late Wednesday from her courtroom in Oakland, California. She found that the lists used to pick targets were riddled with mistakes. She also found that the way the visits were carried out likely broke the Voting Rights Act, which makes it illegal to frighten or pressure people who help others vote.

The judge paused her own order until 5 p.m. Friday. That gives the government a short window to ask a higher court to step in before it takes effect.

What the agents were doing

Over the past several weeks armed officers from Homeland Security Investigations have knocked on doors to question people about their citizenship and whether they voted. Some of the people on their lists were immigrants who later became citizens. The agency has also posted photos and videos of its visits online, including one showing agents putting handcuffs on a California man accused of registering to vote illegally.

The ruling applies in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. In those states agents may no longer carry out election-related home visits or street interviews aimed at people they know or should suspect are citizens. They also cannot act on a name that comes only from a federal data match without doing more digging first.

Why the judge stepped in

Martínez-Olguín pointed to a whistleblower inside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who said last month that the target list was put together in a rush and included citizens. She wrote that bad data paired with heavily promoted arrests gives citizens a reasonable fear of getting tangled up with the police simply for encouraging friends or neighbors to vote.

The case was brought by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, whose members take part in get-out-the-vote drives. The judge made clear she was not saying the government may never look into illegal voting. She said the problem was investigating citizens who have every right to cast a ballot in a way that scares off the people helping them.

A USCIS official had told the court that his team checks records by hand before passing names along. He admitted there was a low chance that citizens could be wrongly flagged but said the need to protect elections outweighed that risk.

The government responds

Homeland Security said Thursday that it remains fully focused on finding, charging and deporting noncitizens who vote. The department said it has no plans to question or investigate people it believes are citizens.

Studies and audits by the states have found over and over that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. It was not clear Thursday how much the order will slow the wider federal push, which has drawn complaints from voting rights groups in immigrant and Latino neighborhoods with Election Day less than two weeks away.