The Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed President Trump’s last-ditch bid to block California from counting 20,000 ballots the feds say were mailed to suspected noncitizens.
Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had asked the high court to order California to segregate the ballots if they are returned, preserving the chance to investigate further to determine whether the voters were eligible.
The justices declined the Hail Mary petition in a brief order.
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That leaves in place lower court rulings that said the request was impractical and improper.
It’s the latest in a tidal wave of court defeats for Mr. Trump, who had sought to pressure states to cleanse their voter lists of noncitizens he said were registered — and voting — in U.S. elections.
In a separate case Monday a federal judge in Washington ruled that the process the administration used to identify suspected noncitizens was bad.
Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said there’s clear evidence that dozens of actual citizens were on the list provided to California — and there’s circumstantial evidence of thousands more.
“The lists are flawed,” Judge Boasberg wrote.
He issued his own restraining order forbidding the use of the lists to block those voters from casting ballots.
A district court in California, joined by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had declared a similar blockade. That was the case the justices dealt with Monday.
Also Monday, the 9th Circuit refused to block another lower court ruling that ordered the government to cease an “intimidation plan” against election officials.
In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel — all Democratic appointees — said Homeland Security is sweeping up some U.S. citizens in its investigations, sending law enforcement to their doors to talk to them about past votes.
“These photos or videos often show armed and masked agents making arrests or confronting individuals, sometimes dragging people out of their homes in the early hours of the morning,” the court said in an unsigned opinion.
The Justice Department’s focus on noncitizen voting has intensified in recent weeks.
The department announced several dozen new cases Monday charging individuals with voting in past elections despite lacking citizenship.
Prosecutors said at least six of the people charged were on the list of the 20,000 California ballots that the Justice Department had wanted blocked.
The late-season focus has hurt the DOJ’s arguments in some of the cases.
The 9th Circuit, in upholding a halt to law enforcement investigations, said the government showed “questionable timing” in surging agents ahead of the election, particularly if the goal was to punish past illegal votes.
The court said the government can send agents out again once polls close on Tuesday.
In the case over the 20,000 ballots, the Justice Department only alerted California to the potential noncitizens in mid-October, after ballots had been mailed.
Courts have also questioned the methods DHS used to try to identify noncitizens.
In California, DHS said it ran the state’s registration database through third-party tools to try to associate Social Security numbers and other identifying details. It then ran those through DHS records looking for people who have immigration files, but haven’t yet attained citizenship.
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, based in Los Angeles, ran its own members who are citizens against the feds’ list of 20,000 names. It found at least 22 who were exact matches, meaning their names appeared on the government’s list as suspected noncitizens.
Another were “near certain full matches,” and using just names and some other identifier, such as birth year or zip code, more than 6,000 CHIRLA members who are citizens may appear on DOJ’s list, Judge Boasberg said.
U.S. District Judge David Carter, who issued the original decision that was before the Supreme Court on Monday, also pointed to DHS’s attempts to identify noncitizens in other states that he said have fallen flat.
The department claimed nearly 16,000 names were on Nevada’s rolls but later reduced that to 185 after a manual review. And Nevada later confirmed all 185 were actually citizens, the judge said.
“Given the vagueness of plaintiff’s descriptions of its procedures and the unreliability of its similar claims in other states, the court cannot conclude that plaintiff’s process is credible,” Judge Carter ruled.
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