Homeland Security agents have 1,900 current active cases probing suspected noncitizen voting, a government official told a federal court on Tuesday, saying all of those investigations could be undercut by a judge’s recent ruling imposing new limits on interviews.
Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a Biden appointee to the court in California, had said the danger of inadvertently sweeping up an actual citizen in an investigation was too great.
She ordered DHS not to pursue investigations into people whom the department “knows, suspects or reasonably should know” are citizens.
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James Harris, assistant director of countering transnational organized crime at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that order is so confusing that it threatens to upend current investigations.
“Voter fraud cannot occur without an election,” Mr. Harris told the judge in a filing. “Hampering DHS’s ability to interview suspected unlawful voters for fear of inadvertently encountering U.S. citizens will effectively lessen the chances that DHS will be able to identify and arrest an alien who would have voted in a national election on November 3, 2026.”
Justice Department lawyers asked Judge Martinez-Olguin to stay her own ruling while it pursues an appeal.
The appeal has already been filed.
DOJ said if Judge Martinez-Olguin doesn’t block her decision, the government will ask the appeals court to do so.
The Trump administration has argued that noncitizens litter voting rolls in some states and are interfering in elections by casting ballots.
Opponents say the numbers are so low as to be inconsequential.
The president’s backers, though, say that’s because nobody went looking before.
The Trump administration has made the issue a priority, and the result is a flood of new criminal cases — dozens per week over the last month and a half — charging noncitizens with registering to vote, lying about it on immigration paperwork and, in most of those cases, actually casting ballots.
The investigation into voting has been tied up in fears of agents actually patrolling polling places.
DHS has said it has no plans to deploy deportation officers, but Trump officials have declined to rule out federal agents altogether, saying there are other crimes such as illegal voting that can be probed by DHS and the FBI.
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