Biden Judge Halts DHS Door-Knocks for Noncitizen Voters in Nine States Through Election Day, on a $100 Bond

A federal judge in Oakland has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop most of its door-to-door work hunting for noncitizens on the voter rolls in nine states, from now until the polls close on Nov. 3. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, an appointee of President Joe Biden, granted the preliminary injunction late Wednesday, 13 days before the midterms, in a lawsuit led by two nurses' unions, Courthouse News reported.

The states are California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. The price the unions had to put up to freeze a federal election-crimes operation across all nine: a $100 bond, due by 5 p.m. Thursday, per the order.

What the order blocks

DHS agents are now barred from "elections-related field operations and field interviews" that involve, or are likely to involve, anyone they "know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect" is a U.S. citizen. They also can't act on the department's citizenship-matching records alone against anyone in that group. The judge put her own order on hold until 5 p.m. Friday so the administration can appeal, CBS News reported.

That wording is the catch. Agents go to a door precisely because a record says the person on it may not be a citizen and the department needs to find out. Now each agent has to decide, before knocking, whether the person behind the door should be suspected of being a citizen. It is like telling a bank examiner he may look into suspicious accounts, as long as he never questions a customer who might turn out to be honest.

The effort she stopped

The order lays out what the administration built this year. In June, DHS's general counsel told ICE to pursue tougher penalties, including deportation, against noncitizens believed to have registered or voted illegally. In August the department launched its "Unlawful Voter Initiative," which has USCIS build lists of people to investigate and hands them to Homeland Security Investigations field offices. On Aug. 31, a "Surge" directive told HSI to prioritize field interviews in the nine states, the order says.

The government told the court it works to clear citizens off those lists before anyone goes out, using multiple data sources to weed out false positives, The New York Times reported. The judge was not persuaded. She faulted the lists as error-prone and noted the rule that agents finish at least 40 reviews, taking no more than 12 minutes to clear a name. She also wrote that "there is no federal database containing citizenship status of U.S. residents."

That line is the heart of the problem the initiative exists to solve. Los Angeles County told a federal court this week that it has no independent way to check citizenship and takes voters at their word. In New Jersey, a motor-vehicle glitch put about 6,600 noncitizens on the rolls. If the paperwork can't settle it and an agent can't ask, nobody checks at all.

The case DOJ just made

The ruling landed two days after the Justice Department charged 28 green-card holders in California with election crimes in "Operation Protect the Vote," arresting 11 of them that day. Prosecutors say they lied about being citizens to register, and many then voted. One, a 72-year-old Belizean national in Commerce, is accused of voting in 2020, twice in 2022 and in 2024. All 28 were on a list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants that DOJ gave California on Oct. 13, a list the state refused to act on, the department said.

"Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen," Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli put it more bluntly: "California is mailing ballots to noncitizens, and they are refusing to comply with federal law."

Who sued, and what the judge weighed

The plaintiffs were the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, joined by San Francisco, Santa Clara County and the Voto Latino Foundation. The judge ruled the city, the county and Voto Latino lacked standing at this stage, so the unions alone carried the case. They argued, and she agreed, that armed agents at doors and DHS's posts about voter-fraud arrests on social media frighten members who register and mobilize voters, a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act's ban on intimidating people who help others vote, according to the order.

Government lawyers warned where that reasoning leads: that "anytime a duly authorized law enforcement officer investigating an election crime makes a suspect nervous, Plaintiffs believe the VRA has been violated." The judge rejected that. Weighing the two sides, she wrote that the unions' and the public's interests in elections "free from interference or intimidation" "far exceed Defendants' purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens."

In a footnote, she added that the court "makes no findings related to the extent of the threat of voter fraud." And she conceded the core point: "Plaintiffs do not claim, nor does the Court find, that it is unlawful for federal officials to undertake investigations into unlawful voting in federal elections," CBS noted.

What's next

Until Friday evening, the order isn't in force, and DHS has kept working. Thursday morning HSI announced that agents in Syracuse, inside one of the nine states, arrested a German national on a federal warrant for allegedly registering and voting in an election with federal candidates on the ballot. On Tuesday, HSI New York arrested an Irish green-card holder on voter-registration and visa-fraud charges.

DHS, led by Secretary Markwayne Mullin, did not immediately comment on the ruling, The Hill reported. The administration has until Friday's deadline to ask the Ninth Circuit to step in while early voting is already underway in states like Georgia. If the order stands, it lasts through Election Day, the exact weeks when a bad registration turns into a cast ballot.