Another day, another legal loss for the Trump administration. On Wednesday, a federal judge imposed significant restrictions on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from conducting field operations to find illegal voters.
The New York Times reports that DHS has been running its “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” which aims to find noncitizen voters. This initiative has involved DHS manually scouring voter rolls, impersonating people, and even knocking on doors at the homes of people they believe to be noncitizen voters. DHS has intensified these efforts in recent weeks ahead of next month’s midterms.
It’s wild that the Department of Homeland Security is spending so much time and money on a problem that is relatively rare. Especially when DHS has gone on record saying it inflated the number of noncitizen voters they have found.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin wrote that the efforts could potentially hamper voter participation. She also raised concerns that DHS used questionable evidence in its investigations.
From The New York Times:
Judge Martínez-Olguin stopped short of halting field operations. But she barred agents from carrying out interviews that “involve or are likely to involve persons” who agents “know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.” Given the unreliability of federal citizenship data at issue in the case, it was unclear how significantly that would hamper the department’s activities.
The interests of the entities suing, “and the public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation,” she wrote, “far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U. S. citizens.”
Internal documents introduced in the case indicated that agents were directed to focus on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
The ruling comes as more evidence has come out that some of the 20,000 names on DHS’s noncitizen voter list are actually citizens. It only gives more credence to Martinez-Olguin’s concerns that the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” is just a voter intimidation effort. Martinez-Olguin placed a hold on her order until Friday to give the Trump administration time to appeal. If they don’t, her ruling will take effect until the day after the midterms.
The Trump administration has spent much of the last year attacking our ability to vote. President Donald Trump regularly advocated for Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which would’ve required people to prove their citizenship every time they registered to vote. He even went so far as to refuse to sign any bills unless the SAVE Act passed.
When that push failed, Trump introduced an executive order earlier this year intended to hamper mail-in voting. The order required the United States Postal Service to implement rules that would force states to change mail-in ballot designs and submit their voter rolls to an online portal. If states refused, postal workers would’ve been forced to withhold mail-in ballots.
Thankfully, Trump’s efforts to disenfranchise wide swathes of Americans have continually been met with legal losses. Several courts blocked the aforementioned executive order, and the Supreme Court upheld that block because it would have disenfranchised millions of Americans ahead of the midterms.
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