citizenship

A federal judge on Tuesday seemed skeptical of a Trump administration request to immediately block California officials from counting about 20,000 ballots from voters whose citizenship the administration questions, but said he would not issue a ruling until Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter questioned how the administration had derived its list of suspect voters, worried about disenfranchising eligible voters, said the demands would represent a “monumental change” to California elections and suggested federal prosecutors bringing the case had other means of holding illegal voters accountable.

But just one day after a federal appeals court rejected the same request, Carter said at the conclusion of a 3½-hour hearing in Los Angeles that he needed more time to rule — except on one related issue.

“This court believes it would be wise — that it would be wise — that any threats to state and county elected employees cease immediately,” he said — a clear reference to federal authorities threatening elections officials with criminal penalties if they count any of the flagged ballots.

After the hearing, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, said he had made it “abundantly clear that American voters are being disenfranchised in real time,” and that the administration will wait to see what Carter says Wednesday but was likely to appeal the matter back up to the appellate court.

He also denied threatening state officials, despite the Justice Department having sent formal letters to election officials statewide last week warning them of criminal punishments, and Essayli reiterated that position Tuesday.

Carter’s hearing came after Monday’s decision from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — the reverse of what’s normal — because Justice Department attorneys had tried to go over Carter’s head after he didn’t acquiesce to a deadline they’d set for him to rule on their request for a temporary restraining order against the state last week.

However, when the three-judge appellate panel — composed of two appointees of President Trump and one of President Biden — ruled 2-1 Monday that it had no jurisdiction to hear the case given Carter hadn’t yet had the chance, the case returned to Carter’s courtroom.

And there, Carter — an appointee of President Clinton — seemed loath to rush to judgment, despite the Trump administration’s claims of urgency. He said the administration’s method for arriving at its list of potential noncitizen voters was unclear and that he would like to develop the record further, including by bringing in an expert for the court.

“What are these systems? What are the algorithms? How was this derived?” he said.

He also seemed unmoved by the Justice Department’s argument that the ballots must be segregated immediately to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted, and more focused on whether noncitizens who illegally vote can be identified and held accountable while avoiding disenfranchising legitimate voters in the process.

For those who do vote illegally, “you’ve got a remedy, for goodness sakes,” he told Essayli. “Go out and indict.”

The Justice Department sued California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan on Oct. 15, two days after Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter gave Weber and Logan 48 hours to set aside the ballots for the 20,000 flagged voters, whom McCotter described as “likely noncitizens.”

During the hearing, Essayli argued on behalf of the Trump administration that its demands on California and L.A. County were not onerous, could be complied with easily and did not call for ballots to go uncounted. Essayli said the federal government was in court “on a very narrow request for an injunction to separate ballots of those suspected of being noncitizens” only until the state can prove their citizenship.

He argued that the “reliability and credibility” of the federal government process for flagging the 20,000 voters is unquestionable — while also telling Carter, “We’re never going to stand here and tell you that everything is 100%.” He said every vote counts, as some elections “are decided by a handful of votes,” and that the federal government is simply asking California not to break existing federal law barring noncitizens from voting.

“We’re not telling California what they have to do. We’re telling them what they can’t do, which is just count these ballots without doing more to ensure whether they’re citizens or not,” Essayli said.

Essayli — who has aggressively sparred with California officials on social media for weeks — also argued to the court that the federal government has maintained a collaborative “tone” since first asking the state to segregate the ballots, and that he was surprised at how “adversarial” state elections officials have been on the issue.

Attorneys for Weber and the state said the Trump administration’s demand on the state “distorts several legal doctrines beyond recognition” and is clearly illegal, particularly during an ongoing election. They said the administration has provided no evidence that the 20,000 voters aren’t citizens, and has used “data and methods known to be unreliable.”

Michael Cohen, a deputy attorney general for the state, said the Trump administration questions California law that allows voters to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, while ignoring the fact that standard was set not by the state but by Congress.

Anne Bellows, another deputy attorney general, said California has an established framework for running elections, and the Trump administration is trying to “sweep it off the table and replace it with a new, unclear procedure in which the federal government can issue a list and require California to change the way a subset of its voters’ ballots are received, and whether or not they are tabulated,” which she said was illegal and a “recipe for disenfranchisement” of thousands of legitimate voters.

“The stakes here are enormous,” she said.

Attorneys for Logan said the Trump administration has made its demands “without any credible argument” as to how it is legal, that the “proposed remedy” it is demanding from the state is “vague and unworkable,” and that if it wants to question California’s existing processes, “the proper audience for that argument” is Congress — not the federal court.

Several attorneys for voting and civil rights groups also argued against the Trump administration during the hearing, including by arguing that its reliance on third-party data sets — including from Lexis Nexis — was not a trustworthy way of identifying whether voters are citizens.

The litigation is just one part of a much wider battle by the Trump administration to intervene in state-run elections nationwide, and particularly in California, including on the notion that state elections have insufficient guardrails to prevent noncitizens from voting. Elections experts say such fraud occurs, but is exceedingly rare.

While the 9th Circuit panel’s unsigned ruling Monday rejected the Trump administration’s appeal for lack of jurisdiction, both judges in the majority — Mark J. Bennett, a Trump appointee, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee — wrote independently to make clear that they would have rejected the case on its merits too.

They said it ran afoul of federal law barring interventions in voting in the immediate lead-up to elections, and the U.S. Constitution, which reserves control of elections for the states and oversight for Congress, not the executive branch.

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee on the panel, also wrote independently in dissent — arguing the federal government must “have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections.”

Carter previously rejected an administration lawsuit demanding California’s unredacted voter rolls as “unprecedented and illegal” — a decision similar to those made by dozens of other federal judges in other states. Federal prosecutors recently charged 28 lawful permanent residents in California with election-related crimes, including illegally registering to vote. Some of those charged expressed confusion, said they had no recollection of registering or had never voted.

There are more than 23 million registered voters in California.

Last week, Justice Department officials sent letters to election officials in counties across California demanding they sequester any flagged ballots in their jurisdictions, and warning them that they could face criminal penalties if they don’t. State officials denounced the letters as a legally baseless intimidation tactic.

Federal judges also have slapped back executive orders in which President Trump demanded new nationwide voter ID and citizenship requirements, and blocked a Trump administration plan to empower the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots for the first time.

Beyond the courts, Democrats and voting rights groups have been strategizing for months on how to prevent the Trump administration from interfering in the midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress. The Trump administration has said it is merely trying to enforce the law and ensure that noncitizens do not illegally vote and negate the ballots of U.S. citizen voters.

A federal appeals court Monday denied an emergency request from the U.S. Justice Department to step in and block California election officials from counting about 20,000 ballots from voters whose citizenship the Trump administration has questioned.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — composed of two judges appointed by President Trump and one by President Biden — ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over the request, given that a lower district court has not yet made a ruling on it.

But two of the three judges also wrote separately to make clear they also would have denied the Trump administration’s request on other grounds, if they did have jurisdiction.

In an unsigned order — joined by Judge Mark J. Bennett, one of the Trump appointees, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee — the court granted a request from Los Angeles County to dismiss the appeal, writing that the Trump administration “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” its request for a temporary restraining order barring the ballots from being counted before filing its unusual appeal to the appellate panel.

The court found that the “emergency” the Trump administration asserted was in part a “self-constructed one” and that delays in the district court were partly attributable to its “own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.”

Both Bennett and Sanchez also each wrote a concurring opinion — in which they made clear that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request even if they did have jurisdiction, too.

Sanchez wrote that federal law would bar the court from issuing such a demand on state elections officials so close to an election.

“The United States seeks to have a federal court dictate to California the manner in which it must administer its own electoral process by segregating mail-in ballots and undertaking a citizenship verification process the State has never done before,” Sanchez wrote. “The proposed injunction would transform California’s election rules for an election that is already underway and would cause widespread confusion among voters and election officials, divert election administration resources, and ‘usher in electoral chaos.’”

Bennett wrote that he would have denied the Trump administration’s emergency request for several reasons beyond jurisdiction, including that it would be likely unconstitutional under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which he wrote “confers broad authority only on Congress and the States, not the Executive,” and Congress has not acted to say that California’s existing laws for ensuring only U.S. citizens vote are problematic.

“Thus, under the Elections Clause, the legislature’s statutory scheme remains as the only method to do so,” Bennett wrote.

Bennett wrote that there are existing California laws to deal with the harm the Trump administration claims it is suffering, but that granting its request to intervene could “result in immense hardship” to the state “and harm the public by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy.”

Bennett wrote that the Trump administration “offered no workable plan of any kind as to how the remedy it seeks could be accomplished in practice without potential catastrophic consequences to California’s ongoing election.”

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee, dissented — arguing the Trump administration was well within its legal rights to intervene, and the appellate court did have jurisdiction to grant its request and bar the state “from accepting and processing ballots likely cast by aliens until their citizenship could be verified.”

“The question — does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections? Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes,’” Bumatay wrote. “Simply, the federal government has a sovereign interest in safeguarding federal elections and ensuring that the votes of noncitizens do not undermine our electoral results.”

The ruling clears the way for the lower court to proceed with a hearing scheduled Tuesday afternoon before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Los Angeles.

Carter, an appointee of President Clinton, previously rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to obtain California’s full voter rolls, calling that demand unlawful and a threat to democracy in January. Other federal judges made similar rulings in dozens of states across the country.

The question at issue Tuesday — and hashed over by the appellate court during oral arguments Sunday — is whether the courts should bar the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan from processing and tabulating the flagged ballots until they can provide to the Trump administration proof that those individuals are citizens.

The Trump administration has argued in court filings that the federal government is suffering irreparable harm each day such counting is allowed to continue, as once California ballots are removed from their mail envelopes or cast in person, there is “no way to associate the voter with the ballot” or resegregate those ballots from others.

More than 3 million ballots have already been cast in the upcoming Nov. 3 midterm elections statewide, and more than 500,000 have already been cast in L.A. County.

Attorneys for California, Weber and Logan have argued in court filings that the administration’s demands to segregate 20,000 ballots and vet those voters for citizenship with just days to go before the election are impossible to comply with and would cause catastrophic disruptions if elections officials across the state were forced to try.

They have also said the demands are clearly unconstitutional, illegal under state and federal law, and based on federal immigration and third-party data sets that have been shown to be deeply flawed, inaccurate and inclusive of legitimate voters.

While the appellate court’s formal ruling Monday adhered closely to the technical issue of jurisdiction, its conversation Sunday did not — with both Bennett and Sanchez expressing substantial doubts about the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s request, just as they did in their separate concurrences.

Bennett grilled Matthew Donnelly, the attorney for the Justice Department, on how the executive branch’s demands squared with the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives states the power to set laws regarding the time, place and manner of elections and Congress — not the executive branch — oversight over those laws.

Bennett said that while the Trump administration is “unhappy” with how California law ensures voters are citizens — namely by requiring that they attest to their citizenship upon registration — the state has the right to determine its election laws under the Elections Clause of the Constitution, and Congress has not challenged its process.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law the California Legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause,” Bennett said. “How can we do that?”

Bennett and Sanchez both questioned how the appellate court could step in and adjudicate whether to grant the Trump administration’s request to intervene in the state’s election when it is not a fact-finding body, and the district court was never given a chance to develop a record of facts — including around the dueling and contradicting claims about the origins and reliability of the federal government’s list of “likely” noncitizen voters and the state’s claims that an order forcing them to segregate out the votes at this late stage in the election would cause catastrophic harm to the election process.

Carter is sure to pick those issues back up on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has alleged that elections, public benefit programs and federal grants to nonprofits are rife with fraud. Now, he is increasingly focusing on fraud in his effort to detain and deport more immigrants.

Recent, high-profile flash points include 28 lawful permanent residents accused this week of illegally voting in California and the federal investigation into Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

The broader crusade takes many forms, including allegations of fraud in immigration applications, illegal voting by noncitizens and misuse of federal benefits by immigrants who don’t qualify.

“This administration has purposefully mischaracterized immigrants and asylum seekers as fraudsters,” said Royce Murray, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration. That, she said, “serves a narrative that immigrants are not to be trusted and are here to take something rather than contribute, with an end goal of trying to make Americans less welcoming and more comfortable with a mass deportation agenda.”

On Tuesday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance announced a $25-million program under the Justice Department to encourage the public to report suspected fraud in the U.S. government.

The White House said the first check, for $10,000, will go to right-wing influencer Nick Shirley, who posted a video last year alleging that Somali residents in Minnesota were running fake child-care centers to collect federal subsidies. Dozens of people were convicted in connection with a sprawling, $250-million children’s food assistance scheme that predated this administration, though more charges have been announced in recent months.

Also Tuesday, administration officials launched another nationwide anti-fraud crackdown, this time targeting immigrants who they allege have illegally collected SNAP benefits. Homeland Security highlighted the arrests of five people, calling them “the opening salvo in a sustained, large-scale ICE operation.”

“From day one of my administration, we’ve waged an unprecedented war on corruption and fraud, and will not let our country be looted and plundered by thieves and pirates and foreign fraudsters and basically scum,” Trump said during a news conference announcing the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program.

Earlier this year, the White House created a task force to eliminate fraud and the Department of Justice created a fraud enforcement division, in part, to target immigration-related offenses. Prosecutors have put aside thousands of other cases to zero in on immigration enforcement.

The focus on fraud has noticeably accelerated in the weeks leading up to the election.

In California, some of the green card holders arrested this week over voter fraud said they didn’t remember registering to vote. The daughter of one defendant, Omar Muñoz, 72, of Belize, said she wondered whether her father had been confused with his U.S.-born son of the same name, who is a registered voter.

California officials pounced on the small number of people alleged to have cast illegal ballots. Illegal voting by immigrants “is so rare that the Trump admin is parading around town about .0001% of California voters,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office wrote on X.

In the last seven weeks alone, the State Department said, 112 noncitizens across 20 states have been charged with illegal voting and registration offenses. Overall, since Trump returned to the White House, 155 people have been charged with voting fraud-related offenses.

Mullin and Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said earlier this month that Homeland Security agents had secured 10 convictions and detained 100 others for civil immigration violations since August.

During the Biden administration, voter fraud charges were brought in just 13 cases, Blanche added.

Studies and audits of state voter rolls have repeatedly found that voting by noncitizens is rare and hasn’t swayed any elections.

Ballot machines at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder in Norwalk this week. Early voting has started for the 2026 midterm election.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Last week, with mail-in voting already underway, the Justice Department sued California, asking a federal court to bar the state from counting the ballots of 20,000 voters who were flagged by federal officials as “likely noncitizens.” Los Angeles County officials reviewed a sample of 200 of those voter registrations and found that nearly 40% indicated they were born in the U.S.

That number of flagged ballots — 20,000 — is a substantial reduction from the 190,000 noncitizens the administration alleged were on state voter rolls earlier this year, though federal authorities this week said they had found a “separate batch of 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens.”

California leaders pointed to other states, such as Nevada, where similar accusations have proved meritless.

Murray, the former Homeland Security official, said she believes the administration is “trying to sow the seeds of doubt that the midterm outcomes will be trustworthy, so that if the Republican Party loses as badly as they’re predicted to, they can characterize it as due to fraud.”

Murray said the Trump administration has largely misconstrued what it means to commit fraud.

“Fraud is a very specific thing — it’s essentially lying,” she said. “Because you don’t get asylum does not mean you committed fraud, it just means you were ineligible.”

In September, a Homeland Security whistleblower told Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that hundreds of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees had been tasked with quickly reviewing the voter information of thousands of people in search of suspected noncitizen voters, and were given a quota of investigating 40 subjects per day.

On Wednesday, a federal judge restricted Homeland Security agents from carrying out sweeping field operations aimed at rooting out voter fraud in nine states, including California.

It is against federal law for immigrants who are not naturalized citizens to vote or register to do so. Penalties can include fines, jail time and even deportation, though authorities rarely pursued that option.

Eric Balliet, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigative arm of ICE, said he takes no issue with investigating fraud, but the timing of this operation and significant resources dedicated show it is “highly politically charged.”

Balliet worked for various administrations, including Trump’s first, before retiring in 2024. Homeland Security Investigations agents typically focused on transnational criminal investigations such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.

Instead of initiating investigations based on tips or specific information, agents are now taking aggregated data and using algorithms to produce suspect lists, Balliet said. That’s not how law enforcement should operate, he said, calling it a massive privacy overreach against millions of law-abiding citizens.

“It’s the epitome of Big Brother,” he said.

Beyond the allegations of voter fraud, the Trump administration has also increasingly targeted immigrants on suspicion of lying to obtain a visa, green card or citizenship.

Omar’s family fled civil war in Somalia and immigrated to the U.S. in 1995 when she was 12. After agents searched her residence this month looking for evidence that her immigration paperwork contained falsehoods, she called the allegations baseless.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Muillin suggested the outcome of the investigation could be deportation. Years ago, the agency declined to move forward with a probe based on similar allegations against Omar, according to the Washington Post.

The congresswoman is not alone.

Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, 56, who died of unknown causes last week at an ICE facility in Texas, was arrested because the agency alleged he had fraudulently obtained his green card. ICE sought to deport him, saying he had failed to disclose a 2004 arrest for theft, but his daughter told the Texas Tribune that he did bring up his criminal record during the application process for his permanent residency.

Immigration lawyers say their clients are facing more intense scrutiny and that some have battled false accusations of fraud after applying for a green card or citizenship.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler blamed the Biden administration for lax vetting that allowed bad actors to exploit immigration programs.

“These abuses are not harmless,” he wrote in a statement. “Meritless claims clog the system, drain limited resources, and delay relief for legitimate victims of crime. USCIS is taking aggressive action to identify, expose, and eliminate fraud.”

Erin O’Neil, an attorney based in Connecticut, said some of her clients are now in deportation proceedings triggered by allegations of fraud over minor inconsistencies that have no bearing on the case. In one case that resulted in a denial based on fraud, she said, the allegation was simply that her client failed to disclose a two-week work assignment in another state.

“In the past, the worst that would happen is your citizenship application would be denied,” O’Neil said. “Now we have seen through several of my clients that, not only is the citizenship application denied, but they are placed into removal proceedings.”

Federal authorities this week teased a “separate batch” of 17,000 potential noncitizen voters in their federal court challenge to California’s handling of alleged voter fraud.

In response, Los Angeles County officials questioned the accuracy of the government’s earlier list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters — saying a preliminary review of a subset of those voters found evidence that nearly 40% were born in the U.S.

The claims came in filings shedding new light on the unprecedented Homeland Security inquiry into California’s voter rolls just weeks before the Nov. 3 election.

On Monday, Nicolas Bartell, a Homeland Security official, wrote in a sworn affidavit that — in addition to developing the disputed list of 20,000 “likely noncitizen” voters at the heart of the litigation — his agency has also developed a “separate batch of more than 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens.”

“Our review is ongoing as USCIS receives records on a rolling basis before the election date,” wrote Bartell, the associate director of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

On Tuesday, Monica Flores, a top official in the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, wrote in an affidavit that staff members had reviewed a sample of 200 registrations from the list of 20,000 voters whom the Justice Department alleged last week were “likely noncitizens.” The office found that more than half — 112 — had been canceled or were inactive, meaning no ballot was sent to those voters.

In instances where those voters’ birthplace was “meaningfully reported, 38.9% indicate that they were born in the United States, which is strong evidence of citizenship,” Flores wrote, while 71.2% showed no record of ever voting.

Flores wrote that similarly vetting the citizenship of thousands of additional voters before the election would not only be “administratively impossible and take key personnel away from their critical election duties,” but would also “risk disenfranchising voters who are validly registered.”

Also Tuesday, Rachel Evans, an attorney in the California secretary of state’s office, wrote in an affidavit that the office since August has received and been complying with grand jury subpoenas for the detailed voter records of about 300 people.

Evans’ acknowledgment came a day after federal prosecutors charged 28 people across California with federal election-related crimes, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application, and suggests federal prosecutors are pursuing criminal cases against hundreds more.

Taken together, the filings indicate that the legal battle between the Trump administration and California over alleged fraudulent voting is only just gearing up — with no end in sight before Nov. 3 — as is the political sparring over the issue.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, posted to X on Tuesday that Flores’ acknowledgment that her office could not possibly vet voters’ citizenship before the election was a “massive concession,” proving the federal government’s case.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said that “any credible allegation of voter fraud should be taken seriously and investigated,” but that federal officials charging just 28 people in a state with 23 million voters showed they have no evidence of widespread fraud.

“Yes, non-citizen voter registration and voting does happen in isolated instances — in California and the rest of the country alike — but it is so rare that the Trump admin is parading around town about .0001% of California voters,” Newsom’s office wrote on X.

The broader case

On Monday, Justice Department lawyers filed a request for an emergency restraining order requiring state election officials to segregate any ballots from the 20,000 voters flagged on the initial Homeland Security list until their citizenship is proved. They argued the state is violating the law — and harming the federal government — by refusing to do so.

State attorneys argued Tuesday that the federal government has no authority over California elections and seeks to violate federal law precluding voter roll purges in the 90 days before an election.

State officials wrote that the Justice Department appeared to have “individualized evidence” of noncitizenship for the 28 people it had charged, and that nothing was preventing it from working through existing “statutory channels” to block those individuals’ ballots. But they argued that it does not have evidence to back its claims against all 20,000 voters whose ballots it is seeking to sequester.

Those contentions — and Bartell’s claim of a second list of 17,000 potential noncitizen voters — only add to an already heated debate about the scope of the inquiry and its legitimacy.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that there “may be as many as 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California,” and demanded that the state work with federal authorities to investigate. The state asked that Homeland Security first provide more information, including about its methodology for identifying that figure.

Last week, acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote follow-up letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar’s office, asserting that 20,000 “likely noncitizens” were on state rolls, and again demanding state cooperation within 48 hours to remove them. Weber balked, arguing that federal law precludes systematic roll purges within 90 days of an election to protect eligible voters.

Weber and other state officials also questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000, and the reliability of the federal government’s underlying data and methodology. “What happened to the 170,000? You just got those wrong?” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta asked.

On Monday, McCotter said the 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” inclusive of cases that federal authorities had high, medium and low confidence in, while the 20,000 figure was “the floor,” inclusive of only high confidence cases.

Potential flaws in the list have been a major point of contention among California officials, who have pointed to substantial inaccuracies in lists elsewhere, including in Nevada, where a state review found that the 185 voters whose citizenship was questioned by the Trump administration were all citizens.

Now, it appears the federal government’s disputed list of 20,000 voters won’t be the last in California.

How voters were identified

In court filings, federal officials described purchasing California voter registration information before USCIS and Homeland Security Investigations agents worked to identify any voters who are not citizens. They said that they did so in part by comparing the state data with “third party commercial data” sets and law enforcement data sets, and that they further vetted their list by culling dead people.

Essayli pointed to those descriptions to dispel arguments that federal authorities have not provided their methodology for identifying potential noncitizens on voter rolls. He said that the federal process was robust and trustworthy and that federal authorities had compiled “overwhelming evidence of tens of thousands of ineligible voters on the state’s rolls.”

Independent election experts saw it differently.

“They admitted to using some of the same tools amateur election conspiracy theorists use, like unidentified third party software, commercial lists, and public versions of [the state’s] voter roll,” Gowri Ramachandran, an election administration expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. “These amateur data matching efforts don’t get any better merely because the Department of Justice relies on them.”

“If DOJ could prove many more cases, we would have heard about it,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote in a blog post. “They’ve been on an aggressive hunt nationally for such fraud. It’s not surprising they’ve found little because it is a small problem.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has ratcheted up its pressure campaign on California election officials to ferret out alleged voter fraud ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election, demanding that officials statewide prove the U.S. citizenship of thousands of voters flagged by the federal government as potential noncitizens, or withhold or set aside their ballots.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter made the demand — which experts called highly questionable at a time when votes are already being cast — in letters to state election officials Tuesday, including Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

The letters, reviewed by The Times, call on the state officials to respond to the Justice Department within 48 hours.

McCotter wrote that the Justice Department had provided Logan’s office with a “password-protected thumb drive with a list of names the Federal Government believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot” for the Nov. 3 election.

“We request that you review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed. For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections officials to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” McCotter wrote to both Weber and Logan.

The demand letter came from U.S. Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter, shown entering a news conference in September 2026 in Washington.

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

Voters on the federal list who haven’t already been sent a ballot should not be sent one until their citizenship is verified, while ballots already returned by voters on the list should not be counted until their citizenship is verified, McCotter wrote.

Weber’s office in a statement late Wednesday criticized the Justice Department for telling it to obtain a list of an unknown number of voters it hadn’t been given directly from Logan’s office, investigate all of those voters and “take action” all within 48 hours, based on inaccurate federal data that has led to U.S. citizens being purged from rolls in other states, and under threat of litigation despite the Justice Department providing no legal authority for the demand.

Weber said the Justice Department’s “relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” and that California already has “robust state law requirements” to ensure only U.S. citizens vote.

Logan said his office was reviewing the Justice Department letter in coordination with Weber and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, but had not accessed the USB drive because state officials “do not consider the device a secure medium” and accessing its contents “would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.”

He said that maintaining accurate voter records is a fundamental responsibility of his office, but also that federal and state laws “are clear on how voter eligibility is established — and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”

Weber previously questioned the basis for a claim by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in July that there may be more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on California rolls, and rebuffed Trump administration offers to work with her office to purge state rolls of such ineligible voters ahead of November without additional information on how it reached its conclusions.

Similar Trump administration lists have been shown in other states to be substantially inaccurate, and to include many voters who are indeed citizens. Election experts say that makes the demand on California — where ballots have already been mailed out — even more concerning.

“One must question why the DOJ would violate its own rules about investigating elections close to election day, and over a week after they knew the state had already mailed ballots out, particularly when their past claims have been full of errors,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Becker noted the Trump administration alleged that there were nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered in Nevada, later reduced that number to 185 after additional scrutiny, and then determined all of them were in fact citizens.

A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement to The Times, defended the agency’s demands to California — saying it “should not be controversial, as the criminal statute is clear: only American citizens may vote in federal elections. It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, and the DOJ is asking California to ensure that is not occurring.”

The spokesperson said the agency could not provide the exact number of voters whose citizenship is being questioned, but that it is in the thousands.

California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber speaks during the state Democratic Party convention in Anaheim on May 31, 2025.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

McCotter wrote that if Weber cannot implement his demands for how to segregate ballots and verify voter citizenship for those on the federal list, the Justice Department “will have no choice but to seek emergency relief” — an apparent reference to seeking court intervention.

McCotter copied on the letters First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles whose office previously sent Logan’s office a series of grand jury subpoenas for individual voter records as part of a criminal investigation into illegal voting.

Essayli’s office referred questions to the Justice Department. Bonta’s office referred questions to Weber and Logan.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said that he is “not aware of anything like this ever happening this close to an election,” and that it may in fact be illegal under the National Voter Registration Act, which “prevents systematic purges of voters 90 days before the election.”

He said that the question of whether that preclusion against purges applies to the removal of noncitizens is an issue that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, in an Arizona case the high court will hear in December, but that the Justice Department’s actions strike him as “legally questionable.”

Hasen said the “whole point of that 90-day rule is to prevent the inadvertent disenfranchisement of eligible voters by mistake in the rush before the election,” and that risk is increased by the inaccuracies of similar lists presented by the Trump administration in other states. “So if there is an attempt to go to court — if DOJ tries to sue over this — they might have a hard time getting a judge to agree that this is something that the registrar must do or even can do.”

The fact that election officials are already busy receiving and preprocessing ballots would only bolster the state’s position in such a case, Hasen said.

“It’s obviously not a convenient time,” he said. “And given the fact that the lists have proven to be wildly inaccurate, at least in other states, it might be sending the registrar on a wild goose chase, when they have more relevant things to do in the election.”

But that “chaos” may be the point, Hasen said. “This is potentially another example of DOJ just making the work of state and local election administrators — which is already quite difficult and stressful — even harder,” he said.

Attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed a lawsuit last month on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo, in which they challenged the Trump administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege registered California voters are not citizens.

On Wednesday, they told the Justice Department that they would be seeking emergency relief from such practices, given McCotter’s letters.

“The federal government’s attempt to pressure California election officials into acting on lists that may misidentify eligible voters is an alarming abuse of power as election season gets underway. This puts our communities and our fundamental rights at risk,” said Carl Bergquist, a CHIRLA attorney.

The Justice Department in recent weeks has announced scattered arrests of alleged noncitizen voters around the country, and Trump administration officials — including Essayli — have pointed to such arrests as proof that noncitizens are voting illegally.

Such voting does happen, Hasen said, but after months of the administration aggressively searching for such voters, the relatively small number of arrests “belies the contention that it’s widespread” or criminal, with many of the few cases identified the result of “administrative error or misunderstanding” rather than an intent to illegally cast ballots.

In his letters to Weber and Logan, McCotter wrote that allowing “noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” and that ferreting out illegal noncitizen voters is a joint responsibility of state and federal officials.

“States are responsible for voter registration, and the Federal Government is responsible for maintaining immigration records to enable verification of citizenship,” he wrote. “Working together, we can more effectively protect against voter dilution and promote election integrity.”

President Trump has pushed Congress to pass a proof-of-citizenship law, signed an executive order seeking a national voter ID requirement and tried to limit mail voting through U.S. Postal Service changes.

None of those moves succeeded in time to affect this year’s midterm elections. It’s a different matter in the states.

More than three dozen voting laws passed in Republican-controlled states are taking effect for the first time this year, many of them containing elements of Trump’s stalled proposals. They include changes to what IDs are acceptable to register for the first time and requirements to show proof of citizenship, an issue the Republican president has tried but failed to get through Congress.

“Trump’s attacks on our elections are deeply damaging, but they are not happening in isolation,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. ”Across the country, states are also advancing restrictions that make it harder for eligible voters to cast a ballot.”

Republican lawmakers who support the tighter voting laws, especially around voter ID, describe them as common sense changes that help build trust in elections.

Trump and other Republicans have been pushing for more restrictive rules since the president’s false claims of widespread fraud in his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s false claims have resonated with Republican voters, a majority of whom believe Biden was not legitimately elected despite all evidence to the contrary. Trump lost dozens of court challenges, his own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, and reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states where he contested his loss all affirmed Biden’s victory.

Among the changes confronting voters as early voting gets underway: Students in New Hampshire can no longer use student IDs; Utah voters returning mail ballots must include more information on the envelope; and some voters in Mississippi might need birth certificates or passports to verify their identities.

Changes to voter ID requirements are challenged

New Hampshire state Rep. Donald McFarlane said he sponsored the bill to eliminate student IDs as acceptable for voting because colleges don’t have the same controls when issuing those cards as government agencies.

“The change removes a special exception and applies the same government-issued ID standard to all voters,” he said, adding that his bill had bipartisan support.

Students, he said, can still get state IDs free of charge.

The new requirements have not gone unchallenged.

In South Dakota, the ACLU has filed a lawsuit seeking to halt a new law that includes requiring voters registering for the first time to present the most common forms of ID — driver’s licenses, Tribal IDs and non-driver state IDs. They must be presented in person at places that accept registration.

“Proof of citizenship in itself is not terrible,” said Kathryn Johnson, president of the League of Women Voters of South Dakota.

Her concern is the requirement to present the IDs in person.

“We’re kind of a remote state, so sometimes it takes a drive, and you have to coordinate, you have to take off work, and all of these kinds of things,” she said.

Some Democrats also have expressed support for voter ID during recent debates. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he was open to the idea as long as it wasn’t based on “conspiracy theories.” When legislatures change their state’s voting laws, they typically give election offices and voters time to adjust. Trump wanted federal voter ID and proof-of-citizenship legislation to take effect immediately, forcing election officials and voters to comply in the middle of the midterms.

Ohio seeks to scrub voter rolls

Ohio has a proof of citizenship requirement in effect for the first time this year for those registering to vote or updating their voter registration information at a Bureau of Motor Vehicles location. The state also eliminated its four-day grace period for mail ballots, which now must be received at local election offices by Election Day.

Yet the biggest concern for voting rights groups is an ongoing purge of the state’s voter rolls. The databases used to check citizenship against voter registration lists can be outdated, said Freda Levenson, legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, which has sued to overturn the law.

“Vast numbers of perfectly eligible voters are vulnerable to being disenfranchised,” she said.

Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, one of the primary sponsors of the bill, challenged the ACLU’s legal action and said the problem it addresses is a real one.

“In the past two years, hundreds of noncitizens have been removed from Ohio’s voter rolls,” she said in an email. “Every single vote cast by a noncitizen disenfranchises a lawful Ohio voter.”

Voters have mixed views on the changes

Outside an early voting center in Wayne County, Ohio, retired steel worker Dan Walter, an independent voter, said he opposes requiring documentary proof of citizenship to vote.

“It’s to keep people from voting, it sounds to me like,” he said.

His wife, Jody, a retired aerospace executive and a Democrat, said she felt the same way about Ohio’s new requirement for registering to vote.

“A driver’s license doesn’t prove citizenship, and that’s all they ask for now,” she said. “It’s going to be an obstacle for so many people.”

Genia Fortune had a different view. A nurse, the Millersburg resident described herself as an independent and said she voted for President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and later for Trump. She believes Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and sees requiring documentary proof of citizenship as a necessary precaution.

“I just feel like you need to be a citizen and show proof of ID,” she said.

Voting and election laws have become a regular target for legislatures

The Trump administration has pushed multiple strategies to influence this year’s midterm elections, most of them stymied by Congress or the courts.

Chris Diaz, director of legislative tracking at the Voting Rights Lab, said the group has seen several versions of the Republican president’s proposals passed by his allies in the states.

A recently released report by the group highlighted some of the key areas drawing Republican lawmakers’ attention, including mail balloting, voter ID and the hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls.

Noncitizen voting has been a focus of the Trump administration despite it being a rare problem. The U.S. Department of Justice recently announced it had brought charges in roughly 90 cases for various types of election misconduct, including 50 against people who are alleged to have voted as noncitizens. The U.S. had 227 million registered voters for the 2024 presidential election.

The Brennan Center for Justice has identified nearly 40 laws in 21 states taking effect this election season that will make it harder for eligible voters to register, stay on the rolls or cast ballots.

The report from the center, part of the New York University School of Law, found that many of the new laws target subsets of voters.

“What I want voters to take away from this is that elections are still run by the states and there are still people in many states who are trying to make it harder for you to vote,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of the center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program. “But that’s all the more reason to go make a plan to vote and participate.”

Fields and Smyth write for the Associated Press. Fields reported from Washington and Smyth reported from Wooster and Millersburg, Ohio.

The United States Department of Justice has filed 40 new cases seeking to strip naturalised Americans of their citizenship over alleged crimes they have committed.

In a statement on Monday, federal prosecutors said they were targeting individuals accused of “serious offenses”, including money laundering, child sexual abuse, visa fraud and tax evasion.

The statement touted the 40 cases as the largest volume of denaturalisation petitions submitted in such a short period under President Donald Trump. The petitions were filed from late August through early October.

“Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” said Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice will continue to employ the denaturalization process to maintain our national security and protect the American people.”

The 40 citizens targeted in Monday’s announcement include people from a range of countries, including Mexico, Pakistan, China and Sierra Leone.

They are accused of concealing criminal acts and other facts about themselves as they sought to obtain citizenship. Their criminal convictions largely came after they took their oaths of citizenship.

Two people on the list are also accused of engaging in espionage on behalf of China. Committing these crimes before they became citizens, the Department of Justice alleges, meant these individuals lacked “good moral character” and should have been denied citizenship.

Expanded use of denaturalisation law

The laws to denaturalise US citizens have been used for decades, but historically, they have been reserved for serious crimes.

After World War II, for instance, the US government moved to denaturalise dozens of citizens accused of concealing involvement in the Holocaust or engaging in war crimes.

Notable cases include that of Emma Goldman, a Lithuanian-born anarchist and women’s rights activist who was jailed in 1917 for her antiwar activities, before being denaturalised and deported to the Soviet Union.

But the practice has become much less frequent since the end of the Cold War.

Top officials in the Trump administration, however, have sought to expand denaturalisation as part of a push to conduct the largest deportation operation in US history.

Under US law, prosecutors can ask courts to strip citizenship from those born outside the country if they wilfully concealed a “material fact” during their citizenship application that would have otherwise disqualified them.

But Trump’s efforts to widen denaturalisation proceedings have received pushback from human rights groups, which argue they could leave people stateless.

Critics have also warned that Trump has sought to leverage denaturalisation against specific groups he perceives to be political rivals or enemies.

Last year, for instance, the Trump administration indicated it would seek to denaturalise large numbers of Somali Americans after allegations emerged in Minnesota of daycare fraud involving the Somali diaspora.

“Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth,” Trump wrote at the time.

Members of Trump’s Republican Party, notably Representative Andy Ogles, have also floated the possibility of yanking citizenship from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda. Trump himself has falsely suggested Mamdani may be in the country illegally.

At one point, Trump even floated the idea of withdrawing citizenship from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, a close ally and adviser to his second administration, after the two men had a falling-out in 2025.

Trump has also pushed to do away with birthright citizenship, which is granted to virtually all children born in the US. The few exceptions include the babies of diplomats and foreign military forces.

Birthright citizenship is protected under the US Constitution and cannot be taken away the way naturalised citizenship can.

In June, the US Supreme Court struck down Trump’s efforts to dismantle birthright citizenship, but legal battles continue after the president issued a second executive order also seeking to restrict how birthright citizenship is applied.

Von Wilpert, 43, has served as a member of the San Diego City Council since 2020, representing District 5.

Before her foray into politics, she was an attorney who founded a legal health clinic in Mississippi to combat discrimination in housing, employment and medical care against HIV/AIDS patients. She later served as counsel on the House Education and Labor Committee and focused on labor rights during the second Obama administration.

As a council member, Von Wilpert authored bills to ban untraceable guns and launched housing grant initiatives for educators. She focused much of her tenure working to update labor laws to allow federal workers to organize, bargain with employers and establish monetary penalties for labor violations.

Desmond, 70, has served as a member of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors since 2019.

Desmond is a Navy veteran and former Delta Air Lines pilot and served as the mayor of San Marcos from 2006 to 2018. As mayor, he worked to reform the pension system in order to balance the city’s budget, growing $40 million in fiscal reserves.

He has been a staunch, fiscally conservative voice on the county board of supervisors, representing county District 5, with a focus on regional infrastructure and supporting additional behavioral health facilities after San Diego County had a series of closures.