A federal judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s zealous pursuit of investigations into noncitizens who are voting in elections has ended up scaring American citizens who fear being swept into the department’s net.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said that amounts to voter intimidation and violates the Voting Rights Act.
Judge Martinez-Olguin, a Biden appointee to the court in California, ordered Homeland Security to more narrowly target its efforts to ensure it’s not including people whom government agencies “know, suspect or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.”
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She sided with the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, two organizations that said their members wanted to be politically active in the run-up to next month’s elections but now fear “the deployment of armed officers in a militarized action.”
“CNA/NNU’s and the public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation, far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens,” the judge wrote Wednesday.
The effort to investigate noncitizens has resulted in the most expansive set of prosecutions for illegal voting in memory.
On Monday alone, the Department of Justice announced charges against 28 people in California accused of registering and, in most cases, casting ballots, despite lacking citizenship.
But Judge Martinez-Olguin said Homeland Security uses databases that are prone to error. That includes flagging the wrong people with similar names and identifying naturalized citizens as being here under an immigrant visa.
The judge seemed particularly troubled that Homeland Security still considered citizens as targets if the databases showed they had cast ballots before their citizenship was approved.
Citing a whistleblower complaint publicized by Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer and Alex Padilla, Judge Martinez-Olguin said federal agents assigned to the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” were given a quota of at least 40 suspects to probe.
They were supposed to complete an initial review in 12 minutes. That also fueled errors, the judge concluded.
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