noncitizen

A new court filing has cast further doubt on the accuracy of a list of “likely non-citizen” voters that the administration of United States President Donald Trump sent to the state of California ahead of the midterm elections.

On Saturday, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), an advocacy group, submitted an analysis to the court conducted by two data scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

It found that more than four in every 10 names on the list were not on California’s voter rolls.

It also found that thousands of potentially eligible US citizens were incorrectly identified as ineligible to vote.

The Trump administration’s list, delivered to California in early October, had suggested that as many as 20,930 “likely non-citizens” were registered on the state’s voter rolls.

That list has formed the basis of a lawsuit, filed on October 15, that calls on California to sequester any ballots sent to those “likely non-citizens”, preventing them from being tallied as part of voting results.

The lawsuit is unfolding in the final days before Tuesday’s pivotal midterm elections, which will decide which party controls the US Congress, as well as key state and local offices.

Trump has expressed fear that, if his Republican Party loses its majorities in the two chambers of Congress, he could be impeached.

The Republican leader also has a track record of spreading false information about elections, including that his defeat in the 2020 presidential race was the result of a “rigged” vote.

He has often targeted California in his criticism. The state – the most populous in the country – is considered a longtime left-wing stronghold. It will elect 52 seats to the 435-member House of Representatives in Tuesday’s elections.

Already, Trump has accused California of “cheating” in its June 2 primary elections, after several Republican candidates underperformed, including Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt.

Under the US Constitution’s Elections Clause, election administration falls solely to the states, though Congress may pass regulations governing voting.

Critics, including California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, have cited that fact in their rebuttal to Trump’s lawsuit.

All 50 states already prohibit non-citizen voting in federal elections and undertake measures to prevent voter fraud, which is considered exceedingly rare.

Other states that have received similar lists of “likely non-citizen” voters have also found significant errors in the Trump administration’s accounting. Nevada, for example, found that none of the names included on that list were non-citizen voters.

Such errors have raised concerns that eligible citizens would see their votes denied if the Trump administration wins its California lawsuit.

Still, the Trump administration has threatened state officials with prosecution over the potential for non-citizen voting.

It has also vigorously pursued its lawsuit through federal court. On Friday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected the complaint a second time, determining it unconstitutional.

“We decline the United States’s invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text,” the court majority wrote in its ruling.

In Saturday’s court filing, the data scientists from UCLA’s Voting Rights Project found that 8,880 names on the list were not listed anywhere in California’s current voter files, a proportion of 42 percent.

Many other names on the list were either confirmed as US citizens or may correspond to US citizens.

“This review proves, at least as a preponderance of the evidence, that demands of election officials under criminal and civil threats, endangers the voting rights of plaintiff CHIRLA’s members and clients,” the filing said.

It was co-signed by the Democratic candidate to succeed Newsom as governor, Xavier Becerra.

In a cascade of rulings in the days before Tuesday’s elections, federal judges have rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to wrest control over state voting processes, pressure state and local elections officials into complying with their demands and turn the midterm vote into another opportunity for immigration enforcement.

In Northern California late Friday, U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson granted labor unions representing California poll workers a sweeping order barring the Trump administration from an array of election-related actions, including demanding that those workers set aside ballots from voters whose eligibility the administration has questioned, and threatening them with criminal sanctions if they refuse to do so.

“Election Day is around the corner. Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting. Workers have already begun processing ballots,” Thompson wrote. “Given the consequences of inaction, the Court sees no reason to delay its ruling.”

A Justice Department spokesperson criticized Thompson for ruling “without even waiting to hear from the United States,” and said her decision was part of a “two-track system of justice” in which other federal judges have delayed the Trump administration’s “own urgent election claims” until after election day.

“The Department is reviewing the order and evaluating all options,” the spokesperson said.

The ruling followed three others — one in district court in Los Angeles and two in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — in which federal judges blocked the administration’s effort to force California elections officials to immediately set aside the ballots of 20,000 voters the administration alleges may be noncitizens, instead setting a schedule for more fact-finding in the case after polls close.

It followed a ruling in a separate case in Washington, D.C., in which a federal judge demanded that the Trump administration turn over its list of alleged noncitizen voters to advocacy groups, including the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Data analysts from the UCLA Voting Rights Project wrote in court Saturday that their review of the provided list found it “contains extensive errors” and includes citizens and thousands of others who are not on California’s voter list.

And it came about the same time as a decision late Friday by the full 9th Circuit not to reconsider a ruling by a smaller three-judge panel upholding an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin in Oakland. She had barred federal immigration agents looking for noncitizen voters from conducting door knocks, street stops and other field interviews in California and eight other states.

The administration’s losses — in cases with broad scope and real implications in an election that will determine control of Congress — are the result of legal challenges from a coalition of liberal states such as California, localities such as Los Angeles County, and immigration, voting rights and labor groups.

But they are also the product of a bipartisan stable of federal judges — including appointees of President Trump — who have described the administration’s efforts as unconstitutional and a threat to one of the most core functions of American democracy.

Those judges weighed that threat against the alleged threats to election integrity from noncitizen voters that the Trump administration claimed, and found the former to be greater than the latter.

“To be sure, there are countervailing public interests at stake. There is a public interest in maintaining the integrity of elections. But as discussed, the district court found that the risks that noncitizens are voting are, at best, uncertain, and also tempered by California’s established voter-eligibility procedures,” wrote the 9th Circuit majority — one Trump appointee, one President Biden appointee — that refused to block the 20,000 votes. “In contrast, there is a material risk that granting the United States its requested relief would result in disenfranchisement and could jeopardize the County’s entire election.”

Those in the coalition resisting the administration’s efforts celebrated the rulings and praised the courts.

“The judicial smack down on Trump’s unlawful efforts to undermine our elections continues,” wrote California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office has litigated several of the cases, in response to Thompson’s Friday night ruling in favor of the labor unions. “Trump is racking up loss after loss as he enters the final death throes of this election and desperately and wildly lashes out against the will of the voters.”

“4 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION DAY. Remember: Your vote matters. Don’t be intimidated. Keep voting as normal,” wrote Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), in response to the same ruling. “The courts are upholding the rule of law, and states — not Donald Trump — run our elections.”

“We said we would not let the Trump administration bully election workers, and today we won a critical court order blocking those threats,” SEIU International President April Verrett said. “This ruling is a victory for the workers who make our elections possible and the communities they serve.”

The flurry of rulings has been prompted in part by the administration itself, as Justice Department officials have worked to push the cases through the courts at breakneck speed in search of relief ahead of election day.

The 9th Circuit has already ruled twice in the case over the 20,000 California ballots, for instance, because Justice Department lawyers appealed the matter before the district court ever ruled, on the notion that U.S. District Judge David O. Carter was taking too long to make a decision.

When the 9th Circuit rejected that effort and kicked the case back down to Carter, he issued one of the most striking rulings of the week.

“Constitutional rights and our democracy are at stake. The public interest favors their protection. Individuals who have met the requirements of California’s voter registration laws must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors,” Carter wrote. “The public interest also favors the protection of election staff, who are working diligently to ensure that all citizens can cast their votes.”

When the Trump administration appealed that ruling once more to the 9th Circuit, the same panel majority — Trump appointee Mark J. Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel P. Sanchez — slapped it back again. They wrote that the administration’s arguments were legally flawed in multiple ways, not least in that they sought clearly unconstitutional executive authority to intervene in an election.

“We decline the United States’s invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text,” they wrote.

The Trump administration’s immediate response was striking — in that there was none.

After weeks of denouncing California officials for continuing to tabulate ballots and stressing to the courts that such counting constituted an emergency from which it required immediate relief, rapidly appealing adverse rulings and arguing over the merits of each twist with California officials on social media, the administration was silent.

The administration missed a deadline for requesting that the three-judge panel’s ruling be revisited by the full appellate court. It made no immediate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A. who argued the case before Carter and has vociferously defended the case on social media, was silent. Neither the Justice Department nor Essayli’s office responded to requests for comment on the ruling.

Oct. 30, 2026 8:59 PM PT

A federal judge in California on Friday barred the Justice Department from threatening or coercing election workers to stop processing ballots.

The order issued by U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson in the Northern District of California was in response to a suit filed earlier Friday by labor unions seeking to bar the Justice Department from intimidating election workers.

Notably, the emergency order was issued without the Department of Justice weighing in on the case.

“Election Day is around the corner,” wrote Thompson, who was nominated by former President Biden. “Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting. Workers have already begun processing ballots. Given the consequences of inaction, the Court sees no reason to delay its ruling.”

It also bars the Justice Department from demanding local election officials segregate or not count ballots that the federal government deems may have been cast by ineligible voters.

“This ruling is a victory for the workers who make our elections possible and the communities they serve,” April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement Friday night.

The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, has warned that “any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy.”

On Thursday, the Associated Press obtained subpoenas issued to election officials in Los Angeles County. The subpoenas request any documents and communications related to letters sent in July and October by federal officials to state election officials outlining the allegations about noncitizen voters. They also seek any information about efforts to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted. At least three L.A. County election officials have been asked to appear before a grand jury the day after the election.

It is unclear whether the Justice Department intends to bring criminal charges against anyone. The department does not typically subpoena people whom it regards as targets of a criminal investigation to appear before a grand jury.

Outside groups win access to the disputed list

In another Friday ruling, another federal judge ordered the Trump administration to share the disputed list of names with lawyers for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. They want to examine who is on the list and assess its impact on eligible voters.

It will be the first time that a nongovernmental organization will have the opportunity to evaluate the merits of the list of some 20,000 names. The federal government promptly appealed the decision on Friday evening.

The Democratic candidate for California governor, Xavier Becerra, is an advisor to the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

The two groups sued the Homeland Security Department in early October to prevent it from using federal immigration data to challenge state voter rolls. The lawsuit cited examples in other states where the federal government’s data have been proven to mistakenly include thousands of citizens. It argued that the data-matching methods risk disenfranchising or deterring citizens from voting. On top of that, plaintiffs argued, the lists could disproportionately target naturalized citizens who are legally entitled to vote.

The Justice Department argues that there is just as much to lose if the ballots aren’t separated.

“Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the vote of an American citizen,” Kiersten V. Pels, a spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email. “The Department makes no apology for protecting those votes.”

In a separate but related 9th Circuit Court decision on Friday, a panel of judges ruled that federal investigations into illegal voting by noncitizens will remain on hold in nine states until after election day.

The judges, all nominated by Democratic presidents, found that the aggressive and public investigations led some citizens to decide not to engage in election-related activities out of fear of being wrongly targeted.

The judges said the investigations, which are looking into alleged illegal voting in past elections, can resume after the midterms wrap up Tuesday.

Riddle, Mulvihill and Swenson write for the Associated Press. AP writer Swenson reported from New York; Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J.

The war over California’s elections intensified late this week after three Los Angeles County officials were slapped with criminal grand jury subpoenas related to their handling of thousands of state ballots, which the Justice Department has demanded be set aside amid claims they could be cast by noncitizens.

Labor unions and voting rights groups hit back, sending a fresh wave of action into the tempest of federal lawsuits already swirling around the ballot clawback order. The storm surged back through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday morning and appeared on a path to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would decide whether to hear the case.

Voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare, law enforcement experts and elections officials say. Yet the Trump administration has doggedly pursued claims to the contrary. Under the subpoenas, L.A. County officials are being ordered to hand over troves of internal documents — emails, text messages and other material — related to their handling of the administration’s demand to sequester 20,000 contested ballots.

The subpoenas also order them to produce any evidence they may have collected “which tends to indicate an alien has voted.”

Prosecutors charge that widespread noncitizen voting disenfranchises Americans by diluting their lawful votes.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Dean Logan and hundreds of workers who report to him are heading into Tuesday’s election under the cloud of criminal investigation, with department bureaucrats ordered to appear in federal court in Santa Ana on Wednesday morning.

“Threats and intimidation have no place in elections,” Logan said.

Who has been subpoenaed and what do the orders seek?

So far, at least three workers from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s Office have been summoned as part of the probe, though the Associated Press reported that prosecutors in all four of California’s federal districts were sending out similar orders.

The Justice Department already subpoenaed thousands of voter records from state and local officials related to claims that noncitizens were voting en masse in California. Now, prosecutors are seeking virtually any written communication from within local election offices about how they responded to those demands to identify and remove such voters, including lists of employees who were told of the directive.

Courts have questioned the reliability of the Justice Department‘s list of potential noncitize voters.

Additionally, the workers must hand over any communications — including self-deleting texts from apps such as Signal — related to the office’s efforts to block noncitizen voting.

The subpoena also demands any evidence the city might have collected indicating even a single noncitizen has voted in an election, as well as details about anyone who might have “aided and/or abetted” them.

“When California has actual knowledge of noncitizens in their voter rolls, if they help them vote, they are now aiding and abetting a criminal offense,” California Central District First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli told Fox News this month.

He doubled down with a post on social media this week, saying his office “will hold accountable anyone who unlawfully participates in our elections and those who aid them.”

Is the Los Angeles County registrar of voters under criminal investigation?

Maybe.

Logan has not been subpoenaed, but the subject of a criminal investigation typically is not subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury because the Constitution’s 5th Amendment protects people from having to testify against themselves.

The Justice Department declined to comment on whether or not Logan might be prosecuted.

“While DOJ maintains that a civil remedy is still available, all agree that noncitizen voting is properly addressed through criminal law,” a spokesperson said.

Instead, the threat of prosecution hangs over virtually any worker who processes ballots the Justice Department might seek to contest.

“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” President Trump posted on social media as the fight ramped up this month.

A lawsuit filed Thursday on behalf of workers by the Service Employees International Union and its partners called the subpoenas part of “a coordinated campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees who are engaged in the hard and important work of administering the ongoing midterm 2026 election.”

The union’s suit also alleged that thousands of California voters could be disenfranchised if courts don’t block the federal government’s efforts “to coerce them into halting the processing and counting of ballots.”

“Threatening these election workers with criminal prosecution for faithfully executing their responsibilities in accordance with federal and state law is plainly illegal and, unless enjoined, risks disenfranchising tens of thousands of lawfully registered voters,” the suit said.

Elected officials also rushed to condemn the move.

“The Trump Administration’s escalating attacks on our hardworking elections officials in California are unacceptable,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on social media.

Can the subpoenas be blocked?

That depends.

An expected order from the Supreme Court could neuter much of the Justice Department’s demand, as the bulk of what officials have been asked to hand over relates to the 20,000 contested ballots whose fate will be decided in Washington, D.C.

The union suit also asks the court to shield election officials from prosecution for counting ballots, which effectively could block the underlying criminal investigation.

Will my vote be counted?

State and local officials have vowed to run the election as usual. The courts have so far supported their effort, with a panel of 9th Circuit judges writing Friday that they “decline the United States’ invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text.”

The judges — two Trump appointees and one nominated to the bench by President Biden — ruled 2-1 in favor of California.

“If the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts,” the panel held.

That decision, handed down just before noon Friday, all but ensures the issue will reach the Supreme Court and be decided there before polls close Tuesday.

But with hundreds of thousands of ballots already returned and hundreds of thousands more moving through the mail over the weekend, the legal fight still could cause delays. And a ruling for the Justice Department from the Supreme Court could snarl the process further.

“Major concerns remain that granting the United States’ requested relief might result in immense hardship to Defendants and harm the public interest by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy,” the 9th Circuit panel wrote.

A federal appeals court for the second time Friday denied a Trump administration request to block 20,000 ballots from California voters the administration alleges may be noncitizens — ruling that the administration had failed to show that “such extraordinary relief, during an ongoing election, is clearly required by law.”

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — composed of two appointees of President Trump and one of President Biden — ruled 2-1 that the U.S. Constitution gives the state and Congress the power to decide how elections are run, and that allowing the Trump administration to “misuse” federal statutes to “prescribe” how California must process ballots would “override the plain and manifest dictates of the Constitution itself.”

“Because Congress has not exercised the specific power granted to it under the Elections Clause to override California’s established laws for challenging ballots or removing ineligible voters, the State Legislature’s statutory scheme remains the only method to do so,” the judges found.

The panel’s majority — comprised of Trump appointee Mark J. Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel P. Sanchez — wrote that “if the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts.”

They also wrote that separate federal law prescribes sweeping changes to voter lists 90 days prior to an election, especially given questions about the reliability of the Trump administration’s list of purported noncitizens.

“The suspect reliability of these lists found by the district court reflects the concern Congress sought to mitigate with the 90-day quiet period,” they wrote.

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee on the panel, dissented — arguing that his colleagues erred in denying a basic request by the Trump administration to ensure only citizens are voting.

“The federal government proposes a modest remedy — stopping California from mixing the ballots of citizens and suspected noncitizens,” Bumatay wrote. “This solution would not cancel any vote but would allow time to verify the eligibility of suspected noncitizens. The district court, and now our court, denies this reasonable request.”

This article will be updated.

Trump administration issues more than 100 subpoenas across 13 states as search for alleged noncitizen voters ramps up.

A United States judge has rejected a Department of Justice request to temporarily halt California from counting mail ballots from a list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens just six days before the country’s midterm elections.

US District Judge David Carter’s ruling on Wednesday came as US President Donald Trump expands efforts to search for alleged noncitizen voters, with subpoenas issued in at least 13 states.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote on Wednesday.

The judge, a 1998 appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the Justice Department’s last-minute request to exclude more than 20,000 ballots ran afoul of “longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections”.

The Justice Department swiftly appealed the decision to the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals and did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the Reuters news agency.

The Justice Department filed the lawsuit on October 15, a rare intervention in the voting process weeks before Tuesday’s election, when voters will choose which party controls Congress as well as their state and local representatives.

Escalating efforts from Trump

The decision marks the latest setback in Trump’s effort to expand the federal government’s role in elections ahead of the legislative midterms, as his Republican Party fights to retain control of both houses of Congress.

The Trump administration issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least 13 states, both Republican- and Democratic-leaning.

Most of the subpoenas Reuters documented were issued to state and local election officials in the past three months, though some date to the start of the year. Many were previously unreported, revealing a federal effort to identify potential noncitizen voters that is broader than publicly known.

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in US federal elections. Legal experts say the records could be used to contest close midterm results, despite scant evidence that noncitizen voting is widespread.

‘Deeply flawed process’

Also on Wednesday, Democracy Docket, a US media platform that tracks election litigation, reported that the Department of Justice list of alleged noncitizen voters “appears to have been created using a deeply flawed process” that could disenfranchise US citizen voters beyond California.

In a court filing, a government whistleblower revealed that voters were being scrutinised nationwide, not just in California, as part of the federal government’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative” investigation, the group reported. The whistleblower warned that “the current process is knowingly sweeping known US citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters’”.

California has said the state’s safeguards against noncitizen voting are robust. It said the Justice Department’s assertions relied on “suspect data” and that complying with its demands would risk disenfranchising eligible voters. Democracy Docket reported that in Los Angeles County, one in four voters on the “noncitizen” list were born in the US.

The U.S. Justice Department expanded its efforts to intervene in California’s ongoing election Friday, sending letters to more than a dozen county elections offices statewide with demands that they segregate ballots from voters the Trump administration believes are noncitizens.

The letters — which give officials 48 hours to act and threaten them with criminal punishments if they refuse — follow similar correspondence the Justice Department sent last week to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar’s office, calling for some 20,000 ballots statewide be set aside and left uncounted until state and local officials can prove that the voters are citizens.

When Weber and Logan balked, the Justice Department promptly sued them and the state in a case currently pending in federal court. The California officials have contended the Justice Department’s efforts are illegal.

The new letters, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, follow previous threats from Justice Department officials and President Trump warning that local California elections officials could face criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime” if they tabulate votes from the “likely noncitizens” the administration has flagged.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles said 57 of California’s 58 counties were served the letters, with the exception of Los Angeles, which had already received a notice.

“The letters speak for themselves. Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said in a statement.

Essayli wrote Friday evening on X that “California does not verify citizenship status. We did the work for them. We obtained the registered voter list and told them who we believe are noncitizens on their rolls.”

Essayli wrote that “knowingly processing noncitizen ballots is a federal crime,” and said authorities “will hold election officials accountable. No one is above the law.”

The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry from The Times. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office declined to comment.

Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber, who is president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said, “From what I’ve been able to gather, most counties if not all of the counties are doing what I’m doing: Sat down with our counsel, went over everything,” Webber said.

Webber said two people with Justice Department credentials showed up at her office Friday and handed her a manila envelope with the letter inside demanding she comply within 48 hours to determine the citizenship of 81 people in her county.

“I can’t tell you anything other than I’m looking at it and doing my due diligence,” she said. “This is not normal protocol for us.”

Kristin Connelly, head of the Contra Costa County registrar’s office, said she was also among those who received a letter. She said she had not yet responded as of late Friday, but was in contact with her county counsel and “colleagues around the state who received similar letters today.”

“The non-partisan Contra Costa County Elections Division administers elections according to all state and federal election laws, as well as the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California. Our work is observable,” Connelly said. “This threat is not helpful and is intended to intimidate.”

The letter she received, from U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, was full of threats of criminal punishment for tabulating votes from individuals whom the county is “on actual notice” may not be U.S. citizens.

Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California, wrote that he was providing Connelly with a “subset” of “407 likely aliens” from the broader statewide list of 20,000 voters, and demanded that Connelly commit within 48 hours to working with Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security officials to identify who among those 407 “is a citizen and who is not.”

“That means sending us the nonpublic information associated with each suspected alien’s registration, which includes everything in your possession from the following: a social security number, a copy of a state ID or driver’s license or the information that appears on it, a copy of the voter registration application supporting the registration, and a copy or list of documents that were presented by the registrant at the time the person registered to vote or obtained their driver’s license if registered as part of motor voter,” Missakian wrote.

He also wrote that he was reaching out by letter “to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by-mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified.”

The Justice Department previously sued California for its voter records. A federal judge rejected the lawsuit, calling the demands a threat to democracy. The Justice Department has also lost similar cases demanding voter rolls in dozens of other states.

California Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement Friday that, “Donald Trump and Todd Blanche are trying to interfere in California elections.”

Padilla, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has oversight over federal elections, added: No matter how many lawsuits they file or how many election officials they threaten, they do not have the authority to interfere.”

Padilla told local election officials, “We have your back.”

“The Trump administration is afraid and desperate,” he said. “Their attempts to take over our elections will fail.”

The Justice Department has received some records by subpoenaing state and county officials for the records of specific voters.

The letters were a topic of discussion among members of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials Friday, with officials working on how to respond.

Logan, L.A. County’s top elections official, sent an email to fellow association members saying he had seen a copy of the letter to some counties — which he condemned as misrepresenting facts and threatening elections officials “twelve days before the election” through a “posture of intimidation.”

Logan called the 48-hour deadline for responses “unenforceable,” and noted that the Justice Department was “demanding individual level data from the named counties similar to what it has previously only obtained through subpoenas.”

Logan’s office has also said that an initial review it conducted of a subset of the 20,000 voters the Justice Department initially flagged found many were born in the U.S., many weren’t actually registered and many had never voted.

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.”

Homeland Security targets nine states in a push to identify voting fraud, a move critics denounce as tantamount to voter intimidation.

A United States federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt operations aimed at finding non-citizen voters in nine states ahead of the midterm elections.

The ruling by US District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said the investigations likely violate a provision of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits voter intimidation. She further said the DHS may have relied on flawed data in its investigations.

That leads to “an objectively reasonable fear of law enforcement entanglements that intimidates citizens from urging or aiding others in exercising their right to vote”, she wrote.

The order applies to federal efforts targeting California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

The DHS has publicised what it has described as a push to identify individuals who have committed voter fraud, with some local offices posting photos of agents knocking on the doors of suspects.

The operations come as the administration of US President Donald Trump has sought to highlight instances of voter fraud ahead of the November 3 midterm vote.

While there are recorded instances of fraud in every election cycle, such isolated cases remain exceedingly rare.

There has been no evidence to indicate that non-citizen voters have influenced the outcome of any election at any level in the country.

In a statement following Thursday’s ruling, the DHS maintained that its investigations were aimed at “removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of US citizens”.

“We have no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be US citizens,” it said.

In their lawsuit challenging the DHS’s efforts, the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, along with the Voto Latino Foundation, San Francisco and Santa Clara County, said that some US citizens felt they were wrongly identified and questioned as part of the investigations.

A lawyer representing the groups said it was “clear from the start that DHS built its lists on bad data, never checked how often it was wrong, and recklessly sent agents to people’s homes weeks before an election”.

Benjamin Farley, the supervisory counsel for democracy defense at the National Immigration Law Center, said the ruling sent a strong message about voter intimidation ahead of the midterm vote.

“Yesterday’s decision is a clear rebuke of the government’s efforts to scare voters away from the polls this November and a reminder that all US citizens – regardless of color, place of birth, or the nationality of their family members – have the right to participate in American elections free of intimidation,” he said.

“No armed federal agent is going to stop us from casting our vote.”

A sweeping campaign by federal immigration agents to identify voter fraud by noncitizens through door knocks, street stops and other field interviews in California and eight other states must be reined in ahead of the Nov. 3 election, after a federal judge in Northern California ruled it has intimidated U.S. citizens and interfered with the work of voting rights groups.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin said in a ruling Wednesday that limiting the Department of Homeland Security’s surging operations in those states — which she wrote “sweep in U.S. citizens for investigation” — does not prevent the Trump administration from “exercising their authority to investigate voter fraud by lawful means.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency is “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote,” and has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”

The ruling was the latest to come out of an unprecedented legal war playing out between the Trump administration and California in recent days, in which an array of election cases are working their way through the federal courts at breakneck speed.

There is, for example, the lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department filed against California and state and local elections officials last week, demanding that they set aside any ballots from a list of 20,000 individuals identified by immigration officials as “likely noncitizens.”

There are also two cases out of Washington, D.C., in which a coalition of Democratic leaders, immigrant rights groups, voting rights experts and naturalized citizens in California are challenging the Trump administration’s use of Homeland Security data to target voters.

The litigation is playing out amid an intense political debate about election security at the national level — driven in part by President Trump, a longtime election denier — and a sweeping campaign by his administration to root out and parade examples of alleged voter fraud in the final days before the election.

White House, Homeland Security and Justice Department officials have all defended the administration’s efforts as necessary to ensure that noncitizens are not illegally diluting the votes of U.S. citizens. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, has claimed to have “overwhelming evidence” that tens of thousands of noncitizens are doing so in California.

‘That is not normal’

Democratic leaders and prominent elections experts, meanwhile, have cast the administration’s claims as baseless and intentionally exaggerated to stoke uncertainty about election security and ultimately challenge midterm results the president doesn’t like, and the Justice Department’s legal arguments as fundamentally flawed and wildly out of line with long-established department policy to stay out of elections in the lead up to voting.

“That is not normal. We have literally never experienced that in American history. Not once,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former Justice Department elections attorney. “The fact that the administration appears poised for the first time to act as an adversary to the states and counties who have [the] undisputed constitutional authority to run elections? That is unusual.”

At the same time, Becker and other experts stressed that those efforts to date have failed, and state and local elections have largely proceeded in recent weeks without incident, with millions of Americans having already cast their ballots.

“California voters need to know that they’re in good hands, that we have leaders at the state and local levels who are protecting our ballots and are ensuring that these attempts by the federal government to root out supposed noncitizen voting are not going to prevent Californians from casting our ballots,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “Part of the strategy here is to distract people and scare people and raise fears, and the important thing is to continue to stay focused on … making a plan to vote.”

Status of cases

Federal courts have already rejected multiple Trump executive orders seeking to enforce nationwide voter ID and citizenship requirements. The Supreme Court blocked an administration plan for the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots. The Justice Department has compiled a stunning record of losses in its 30 lawsuits demanding state voter rolls — with 26 of those cases, including the one in California, so far dismissed.

And election experts said they expect the Trump administration to rack up more losses in coming days — including in the Justice Department’s case challenging California officials’ refusal to segregate the ballots of some 20,000 voters based on the administration’s unsubstantiated claims they are noncitizens.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, shown in 2023, is overseeing a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice says 20,000 California ballots may have been sent to “likely noncitizens.”

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

That case was taken up — and scheduled for a Tuesday hearing — by Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of President Clinton who in January rejected the administration’s demand for California’s voter rolls, calling it a clear federal overreach that would have a “chilling effect” on voters and threaten American democracy.

California has called for the case to be dismissed outright, on the grounds that the administration has zero authority to make such demands, and that the demands are unlawful. The Trump administration has asked Carter to immediately rule in the matter.

“Every minute of [ballot] processing that occurs without segregating the ballots of suspected non-eligible voters causes untraceable disenfranchisement and dilution of the votes of United States citizens,” wrote Julie Hamill, an assistant U.S. attorney in Essayli’s office.

In D.C. federal court, Judge James E. Boasberg set an Oct. 30 hearing in a case in which UCLA Voting Rights Project attorneys, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo are challenging the administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege California voters aren’t citizens.

Carl Bergquist, an attorney for CHIRLA, said he looked forward to bringing a host of recent Trump administration actions to the court’s attention — including the administration’s lawsuit against California, the charging this week of 28 legal permanent residents in California with election-related crimes, and Trump’s threats to arrest California elections officials who don’t comply with his administration’s demands.

“The events of the last few days, from threats to state and local officials, increased general immigration operations, the random knocking on doors by federal agents and the recent arrests are causing a chill in the community,” Bergquist said. “People, including naturalized citizens, are making their plans to vote and the Federal Government is doing its utmost to quash their attempts to exercise this fundamental right that they have lawfully acquired.”

The argument that naturalized citizens are being intimidated also features prominently in a second lawsuit filed in D.C. federal court Tuesday, in which top Democrats in Congress joined Nevada party officials and a California immigrant named Erick Jose Jimenez to challenge the Trump administration’s unprecedented voter fraud probes.

That lawsuit, also assigned to Boasberg, says Jimenez, a naturalized citizen since 2006, fears being “unlawfully targeted for voting and disenfranchised (or worse).”

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who studies elections and was a senior policy advisor on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said there is “so much noise” around the election right now, in part because the administration has been making wild legal arguments about its authority over elections.

But he said “none of the federal government’s attempts to assert power that they do not have are working,” and voting “for 99.999% of the public” will remain “wonderfully normal.”

When federal prosecutors charged 28 California immigrants with illegally registering to vote, they invited friendly media outlets to document the early morning arrest of one suspect.

At a news conference in Los Angeles this week, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli intoned that the defendants’ alleged crimes proved President Trump’s long-held conspiracy theory that voter fraud threatens democracy and that noncitizens are voting by the boatload. Mug shots of the accused — lawful permanent residents, some of whom said they didn’t recall registering to vote — were displayed as if they were part of a Mafia-like conspiracy.

It all felt staged for maximum humiliation.

So what happened to a Costa Mesa woman who registered her dog to vote and attempted to cast ballots for it in two elections?

There was no perp walk for Laura Lee Yourex, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. No melodramatic news conference from Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer.

Nah, Spitzer dismissed Yourex’s case after she paid $1,500 for four electronic billboards along the 22 and 55 freeways. They feature a photo of her late boxer Maya Jean sporting an “I Voted” sticker alongside a warning — “Don’t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime” — and the district attorney’s election fraud hotline number.

Yourex’s attorney has said she was trying to expose flaws in the state’s voter registration system by showing that even a dog could cast a ballot, a gimmick for which Spitzer had little sympathy.

He’s usually the modern-day equivalent of a hanging judge, the type of hard ass who wants his prosecutors to not only throw the book at defendants but also to bury them with a library. In an email, he told me that his office has successfully prosecuted two other voter fraud cases during his eight years in office and is pursuing three current ones. But as serious as voter fraud is, Spitzer has never preened in these cases the way Essayli has.

The Republican stalwart declined to comment on Essayli’s approach, saying he’s “not privy to any of the evidence in those cases.” When I asked why he chose a chuckle-inducing billboard as Yourex’s punishment, he argued that it successfully “address[ed] the harm that is done when engaging in this type of criminal behavior.”

Leave it to the Trump administration to make Spitzer — whose campaign slogan for his 2022 reelection was “#NoLAinOC” — come off as a big ol’ liberal softy. But when it comes to voter fraud, at least he’s meting out penalties that fit the crime, while Essayli is once again making Trump his North Star, not the Constitution.

The defendants charged with voter fraud deserve punishment, if they are indeed guilty. But as my colleagues Brittny Mejia and Kevin Rector reported, citing election experts, cases of noncitizens registering to vote are often a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of immigrants, for example, if they accidentally check a box at the DMV.

Essayli’s record as Trump’s top lawman in Southern California — he can’t even call himself the region’s U.S. attorney, since he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate — is so laughable that I wouldn’t believe him if he claimed that water is wet.

His prosecutors have gone after activists involved in protests against Trump’s masked deportation goons with shoddy charges that were dropped, rejected by grand juries, ridiculed as “amateur hour” by a federal judge or resulted in not guilty verdicts. He’s a lackey who silently stood and watched last year as FBI agents tackled Alex Padilla during a news conference in Los Angeles just because the U.S. senator dared to challenge then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s ludicrous defense of mass immigration raids. He’s a coward who regularly declines to talk to press outlets — including The Times — that don’t think Trump is the greatest president in history.

Unsurprisingly, my request to interview Essayli — or at least receive emailed answers to questions including whether every felony defendant gets arrested with a phalanx of armed officers surrounding their home, whether that’s occurred in other voter fraud cases and whether his office regularly releases mug shots of felony defendants — went unanswered.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said his office is pursuing three voter fraud cases.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Mejia and Rector spoke to some of the accused immigrants and their families swept up by “Operation Protect the Vote,” who were bewildered as to what they had done wrong and why the U.S. Justice Department was swinging such a heavy hammer against them. They shouldn’t be.

What Essayli is doing in the name of rooting out voter fraud isn’t about upholding the law. It’s about validating Trump’s xenophobia. The show trials the defendants will probably face are not about getting rid the worst of the worst, as Trump long claimed. It’s about casting suspicion on all immigrants, legal and not.

What’s especially ironic — no, disgusting — about Essayli’s claims that immigrants who wrongly register to vote are disenfranchising American citizens is that the portrait of this country’s biggest election scofflaw hangs in every federal courthouse. It was Trump who wanted Congress to stop the electoral college from formalizing his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, claiming that Democrats stole the White House from him, and provoked a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol.

But facts have never stopped Essayli from making a pendejo out of himself. His pathetic, dangerous charade reminds me of an infamous voter fraud case from 30 years ago. I wrote about it this summer when Trump first announced he was going to sic the Justice Department on noncitizens who were supposedly voting en masse.

Back then, Loretta Sanchez forever changed O.C. politics when she beat Republican Rep. Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Like Trump, Dornan claimed he lost because of immigrants who illegally voted. Like today’s GOP, sympathetic prosecutors and lawmakers at the local and federal levels spent way too much time and taxpayer money looking into the baseless allegations.

Just as Operation Protect the Vote has already shown this year, with only 28 charged out of about 23 million registered voters in California, Sanchez’s 1996 victory was not achieved through a vast immigrant voting conspiracy.

At least in the Dornan fiasco, Republicans finally dropped their investigation and moved on. The few immigrants who did vote improperly had their ballots tossed but otherwise faced no legal problems.

I doubt Trump and Essayli will give up so easily. That would require humility, mercy and the ability to admit they’re wrong.

But hey, if a dog can cast a vote in California, I guess anything’s possible.

Top Democrats in Congress have joined a California immigrant and the Nevada State Democratic Party in suing the Trump administration over its unprecedented voter fraud probes in both states and broader efforts to meddle in state-run elections nationwide — alleging they are a “pretext to seize control over elections.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., late Tuesday, accuses President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and the agencies they lead of using “shoddily compiled lists of supposed noncitizens” and “coercive threats of legal retaliation against state officials” to assert federal control over the Nov. 3 midterms.

In addition to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and several national Democratic groups, the plaintiffs include Erick Jose Jimenez, an “active California voter” and naturalized U.S. citizen since 2006 who now “fears that he will be unlawfully targeted for voting and disenfranchised (or worse)” given the Trump administration’s track record of misidentifying naturalized citizens as noncitizens.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that while “Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud, the Trump Administration is taking decisive lawful action to protect our elections,” including by “prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion.”

“Anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable,” Bis said.

A Justice Department spokesperson said “election integrity is a top priority” and that the department’s actions are “grounded in the law and being litigated in open court.” A Homeland Security spokesperson said it is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.”

Officials from both agencies have asserted that California and other states have ineffective policies for ensuring noncitizens do not vote — relying in part on voters attesting to being citizens — and staunchly defended their own processes for identifying noncitizens on state rolls.

Democrats and leading elections experts say isolated voter fraud does occur and should be taken seriously, but that there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

Tuesday’s lawsuit cites Trump administration claims of thousands of potential noncitizens on Nevada voter rolls crumbling amid state scrutiny. It also cites an administration list of 20,000 “likely noncitizens” allegedly on California rolls being “proven remarkably slapdash” and inaccurate in recent litigation between the administration and California.

The lawsuit alleges a coordinated effort between Trump and other administration officials — in violation of the 10th Amendment and other federal law — to intimidate state and local elections officials nationwide into removing voters from rolls, denying ballots to legally registered voters and segregating the ballots of others “based on spurious and unreliable claims that they are not citizens.”

It says the president is pushing the above efforts not “in a vacuum,” but in the face of repeated steps by Congress and the courts to block his election agenda.

The lawsuit, backed by prominent Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias, follows another filed in the same court last month by attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo.

That ongoing lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege registered California voters are not citizens, which it says risks misidentifying eligible voters and has left naturalized citizens frightened — the same argument made by Jimenez.

Jimenez, who could not be reached for comment, has “eagerly and consistently exercised his right to vote” since becoming a citizen two decades ago, and plans to vote in the Nov. 3 election but fears being misidentified as a noncitizen and targeted, Tuesday’s lawsuit says.

Administration officials have defended the accuracy of their lists, including in the lawsuit the Justice Department filed against California last week. In that case, the Trump administration has asked the court to force California to set aside the ballots of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” it flagged until their citizenship is confirmed.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A., has said that list was compiled using public California voter registration records and third-party and law enforcement data, and that federal authorities have “overwhelming evidence” that those voters are ineligible.

On Monday, federal authorities filed fraudulent registration and other election-related charges against 28 lawful permanent residents in California, which Essayli said “prove our list is accurate and that noncitizens are actually voting.”

However, other administration officials have acknowledged the lists may not be entirely accurate. Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter said Monday that “there may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” A Homeland Security official said in a court filing Monday that “discrepancies” have been found in about 189 of the records.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office — both named defendants in the California case — have accused the Trump administration of illegally interfering in state elections and trying to purge voters in the immediate lead up to an election in violation of federal law using inaccurate data.

Logan’s office said Tuesday that a preliminary analysis of a subset of the administration’s list found many were born in the U.S., weren’t registered or had never voted.

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.”

At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.

Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.

Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.

Both were among the 28 people charged with federal election-related crimes Monday, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Federal prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials had touted the arrests during a news conference hours before as proof that California elections are corrupted by noncitizen voters — as President Trump has long alleged.

State officials said the isolated instances of noncitizens voting, if accurate, are not evidence of widespread voter fraud. They also raised questions as to whether the charges could be trusted to be accurate — citing similar accusations being disproved elsewhere in the country.

Election experts have said many instances of noncitizens registering to vote are a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of the immigrant — not intentional criminality.

“We know from past experience that sometimes people register to vote accidentally, as when there is a mistake at the DMV,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote Monday in a blog post. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law.”

Four of the defendants charged Monday had initial court appearances later that afternoon. Beforehand, more than a dozen of their loved ones milled around the federal courthouse in downtown L.A., antsy and clearly worried.

One woman, her baby and young daughter in tow, struggled to find the right courtroom. Another woman — Domínguez’s daughter — cried in the hallway as she waited for her mother’s case to get called up. When Domínguez moved to stand before the judge, she blew a kiss to her husband and daughter in the second row. She wore a black back brace and her legs were cuffed.

A third defendant — Omar Muñoz, 72, a lawful permanent resident from Belize whose arrest at his home in Commerce was captured by photographers in images transmitted around the world — shuffled into a court room shackled at the waist, his feet cuffed, still wearing the red and black pajama pants he’d been arrested in.

Homeland Security Investigations task force officers escort a suspect accused of illegally registering to vote to a processing facility at Federal Building in Los Angeles on Monday.

(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)

Muñoz was charged with fraudulently registering to vote in September 2019, and then voting in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, when he claimed to have never falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in the past.

In the court room, Muñoz held a hand over his heart as he waved to his family in the first row of the gallery.

Hasen, the UCLA expert, wrote that the government’s blasting out images of Muñoz being arrested was clearly “meant to convey that the problem of noncitizen voting in California is both pervasive and serious, crimes that are undetected by willfully ignorant California election officials.”

But the reality, he wrote, “is likely far different,” with voter fraud limited to isolated cases, some with less nefarious intent.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Monday that the cases represent strong federal work to ensure that noncitizens aren’t negating the votes of eligible U.S. voters — a problem he said California officials have refused to recognize despite federal authorities providing the proof.

Essayli dismissed the idea that those charged may have been unaware of what they were doing. “You have to go out of your way to register to vote, it’s not something that just happens to you,” Essayli said.

José Antonio Bañuelos-Díaz, 42, a Mexican national and West Adams resident, appeared in court wearing a reflective vest with the name of a landscaping company, blue jeans and boots with the American flag on them. He’d been on his way to work when he was arrested.

During the hearings, the defendants only spoke to acknowledge that they reviewed and understood the charges against them. In every case, the federal prosecutor said the government was not seeking detention.

The magistrate judge ordered the four released on personal recognizance and said they were not required to be under supervision. They are all set to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on November 9. Their deputy federal public defenders did not respond to a request for comment.

Lliani Orantes, Muñoz’s daughter and a nurse who was born in the U.S., said her father had been hauled out of the family home by federal authorities after they swarmed and cordoned off the block. She said the family was rushing to figure out what happened, including whether Muñoz could have been confused with younger relatives of the same name, including a U.S.-born son who is a registered voter.

Orantes also expressed frustration with the handling of her father’s arrest — to which federal authorities had clearly alerted some media, who were brought along for the raid.

She said her father is recovering from cervical surgery, rotator cuff repair on a shoulder and a double knee replacement, and that he was pulled out of the family’s home “like he was a dog” as part of what she described as a “political ploy, an example used for the operation” — which federal authorities dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”

“They’re trying to instill fear in society,” she said.

“We have so much more in the world to be dealing with, do we really need to focus on these little things that could be taken care of in a different fashion? In a different way? Like, hey, somebody from immigration visit the home,” she said.

Acting United States Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter speaks at a news conference Monday to announce charges against 28 people in California accused of illegally registering to vote as noncitizens.

(David Butow/For The Times)

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta — who is defending the state and top election officials for the state and Los Angeles County against a lawsuit from the Justice Department alleging they are not treating alleged voter fraud by noncitizens seriously enough — said Monday that voting illegally is wrong and “one off, isolated incidents” of it should be prosecuted.

But Bonta denied that there is widespread voter fraud in the state, called 28 cases brought out of the 23 million registered voters in California a “drop in the bucket,” and said he’d be watching how those cases play out in court.

“We’ll see what the facts show, and whether they’ll have to drop charges or whether they’ll be able to prosecute,” he said.

About 3 p.m. Monday, the four defendants at the downtown courthouse were released and exited the court room, some to family members waiting in the hallway to hug them.

Domínguez wiped away tears as she recounted her arrest, showing bruises on her wrists from the handcuffs.

“They were accusing me of voter fraud since 2006,” she said. Domínguez said the accusations don’t even make sense considering she has never voted.

“If I would have committed all those frauds about voting registration and whatever they’re saying, since 2006, wouldn’t you imagine that I would have been voting all these other years?” she asked.

In a visual presentation at their news conference, federal authorities alleged that 21 of the 28 people charged had actually voted. Domínguez was not one of them.

Domínguez said she’s been a lawful permanent resident since the late 1980s, and that she applied for U.S. citizenship earlier this year. As part of the application process, she said she told an immigration agent that the only people registered to vote in her household were her husband, who previously became a U.S. citizen, and her daughter, who was born in the country.

Since then, Domínguez said she has just been waiting on the citizenship ceremony, “but it never came through.”

Instead, she was arrested Monday when she was about to leave for work as an administrative assistant.

“I never, ever in my entire life … thought this would ever happen to me,” she said.

Acting U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter stands next to a display showing photos of people charged with illegally registering to vote during a news conference on Monday.

(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Muñoz and his family gathered outside the courthouse. Muñoz, who declined to comment on the charges against him, said he’d been up to have coffee early that morning when he heard the commotion outside. Agents said if he didn’t open the door, they’d break it down.

He described seeing helicopters, at least eight cars and several agents from different agencies descending on his home, and recalled thinking, “What movie am I in?”

“That’s a lot of money. Taxpayers paying for that,” he said. “They could have sent me a letter saying report to the court.”

Muñoz — who said he came to the U.S. legally in 1975 and has “paid all my taxes” since — said he explained to the arresting agents that he’d had six surgeries recently and they “didn’t care.” He said he didn’t learn about the charges against him until four hours later.

Muñoz’s son, Omar Muñoz Jr., questioned why federal agents didn’t take his father’s age and ailments into consideration.

“We understand that there’s a procedure that has to be addressed at court. But 5 in the morning, handcuffed? It’s just the way everything was done, and what my mom had to go through. It’s not just an impact on my father’s health, but also on my mom,” he said. “There is a law, we understand that. But innocent until proven guilty.”

Muñoz’s wife, Esmeralda, echoed her son’s questions about why so many agents were deployed to their home.

“Seriously? All these people just to come for an elderly person,” she said she told a federal agent. “It’s unbelievable.”

Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — again escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.

Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday morning and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of casting votes, some in multiple elections. None are undocumented immigrants, a favorite target of President Trump and a group he has accused of infiltrating U.S. elections in the past.

Those charged represent a tiny fraction of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” that the Justice Department alleged are on California rolls just last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration alleged were on state rolls as recently as July.

State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has badly overstated voter fraud claims in other states. In Nevada, for example, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens. The administration has repeatedly revised downward its estimate for how many “likely noncitizens” are on California’s rolls.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.

“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”

State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader claims — said voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any voting allegations from the Trump administration must be viewed with skepticism.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn referred to Monday’s arrests as “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections.”

“These arrests are being used to paint a picture of widespread voter fraud when we know that is not the case,” Hahn said. “California has laws in place to protect the integrity of our elections, and L.A. County is fully abiding by them.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 individuals charged Monday “represent a tiny fraction” of California’s 23 million registered voters, and that the Trump administration has not shown “evidence of widespread voter fraud, even if the allegations are true.”

Shifting claims

For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California — suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”

When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.

In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters’ citizenship can be verified — again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.

“This Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election — including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning — until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” federal attorneys wrote.

The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it’s charged — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ’s track record, the lion’s share will be eligible voters.”

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent “.0001% of California voters,” and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 “raises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.”

McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.

“So there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.

McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a “false storyline,” in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted — and found to be citizens — were those the federal government had held “high confidence” in being noncitizens.

How the Justice Department further zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals also was not entirely clear.

U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.”

Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not “based on assumptions or a single piece of information,” but required “thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts.”

Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. “This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made-up stuff.”

Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old Omar Munoz from Belize, who was arrested in a pre-dawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.

In federal court downtown late Monday, Munoz’s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.

She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father’s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. “Did the names get misconstrued,” she wondered.

McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.

What’s ahead

Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.

Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak” and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.

“When we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,’” he said. “That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.”

McCotter said there “may be some names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities are “not perfect,” which is why they’ve asked California officials to work with them. “We could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.”

He said the timeline — amid an ongoing election — was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. “It’s an emergency of their own creation.”

First came the letter from acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter — just three weeks before the Nov. 3 election — demanding that Los Angeles County’s top elections official launch a sweeping investigation into thousands of voters the Trump administration alleges are “likely noncitizens” and withhold their ballots in the meantime.

The letter arrived with a thumb drive purporting to contain the list of voters in question, and a handwritten note providing the password. Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, said accessing the device broke security protocols, and he wouldn’t open it.

Then came an Excel spreadsheet, listing some 20,000 voters by name, date of birth and address. It appeared to contain voters from across the state of California, not just L.A. County, and provided no information on the Trump administration’s methodology for questioning those voters. Logan’s office again pushed back.

“We cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations, nor can we disregard the legal requirements governing our election — and we certainly have no authority to act on records that are outside of our jurisdiction,” Logan said.

On Friday, the back and forth escalated yet again, when the Justice Department warned in a letter to L.A. County attorneys that county elections officials who tabulate ballots from the flagged voters could face criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

For the last week, Trump administration officials and California election leaders have been locked in a fiercely contentious standoff over alleged election fraud that independent elections experts say is like nothing they have ever seen before.

The battle — which escalated into a federal lawsuit filed Thursday by the Justice Department against the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Logan — features striking assertions of official misconduct. They include willful indifference to systemic election fraud among California officials, as alleged by Trump officials, and a nefarious effort by the administration to “lay the groundwork” for questioning any unfavorable election results next month, as alleged by California leaders and independent elections experts.

With little public clarity around the voters whose registration is being contested and how the administration came to question their eligibility, the debate has centered instead on the efficacy of vetting voter rolls right before an election and the increasingly bitter claims of political meddling from the many federal, state and local officials involved.

“More dangerous nonsense from a President losing his grip on reality,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter sent a letter demanding that L.A. County’s top elections official investigate thousands of voters the Trump administration alleges are “likely noncitizens.”

(Finn Gomez / Getty Images)

“No, Governor. You are violating federal law by facilitating voting by noncitizens,” responded First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, whose office is leading the lawsuit.

“Mail ballots are already in most voters’ hands, and Election Day is less than three weeks away. Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S. The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta wrote on the same platform.

“We produced a list of 20,000 noncitizens on your voter rolls, and your response is ‘it’s too late’ because you already mailed the ballots. Not good enough,” Essayli shot back. “It’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law for California to dilute the votes of American citizens.”

Both sides have accused the other of being unreasonable and of ignoring practical concerns about voting and election security, though in very different ways.

Trump administration officials have said their effort “should not be controversial,” and reflects a common-sense approach to election oversight. “The law is clear, aliens in the United States cannot vote in federal elections,” McCotter said.

In its lawsuit, the Justice Department argued it is “not practicable or feasible” for the federal government to investigate “thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of individuals” before the November election alone, so California and local officials should be required to help them do it.

California officials — joined by independent elections experts — have accused the Trump administration of breaking the law to bolster a grand election conspiracy the president has propped up for years without evidence, including by trying to purge voters from rolls right before an election.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from conducting systemic maintenance of voter lists within 90 days of an election, and that the U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed that limit.

Bonta said the timing of the Justice Department’s demands “reeks of desperation and bad faith.”

Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, attends the opening of a new ballot processing center in City of Industry in 2024.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

State officials and election experts also have questioned why Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested California had some 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls as recently as July if the number now stands at 20,000.

“What happened to the 170,000? You just got those wrong?” Bonta said. He also noted with derision that the administration’s lawsuit repeatedly hedges its assertions by saying that federal officials “believe” that noncitizens “may be” registered in California.

“You believe, or you know?” Bonta said. “They may be or they are?”

Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the 20,000 flagged voters “are the ones that have been manually verified” as ineligible, but that number “can and will go up” as federal authorities continue their work. She referred additional questions about the figures to Homeland Security, which did not respond to questions.

Becker said the administration’s figures “should be treated with serious skepticism,” given similar claims falling apart elsewhere. He cited a Homeland Security claim of about 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada voter rolls dropping to 185 voters before Nevada officials investigated and found every single one of those voters was a citizen.

California officials have not shown a similar interest in launching their own investigation.

In a letter to McCotter, Weber wrote that treating the 20,000 voters on the Justice Department’s list as “ineligible until proven otherwise” would not only violate the 90-day quiet period before an election, but amount to “an unprecedented suspension — and even denial — of voting rights.”

She said if the Trump administration has any proof for its claims, California would “review that evidence and any supporting data or methodology” and “take the appropriate steps in compliance with federal and state law” to address any problems. “However, I will not disenfranchise thousands of Californians — or order any county elections official to do so — based solely upon an unsupported and likely inaccurate ‘belie[f]’ that certain voters are ‘likely’ noncitizens.”

A spokesperson for Logan’s office said Friday that it was reviewing the Justice Department’s spreadsheet — in part to determine how many of the voters are actually in L.A. County — but had yet to receive requested information on the methodology used for flagging those voters.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, chair of the Democratic Assn. of Secretaries of State, said the Trump administration’s efforts in California are “another attempt by the federal government to harass and intimidate elections officials,” and that their timing is “obviously a political attempt” to prevent voters — particularly Latino voters —from holding the Trump administration accountable for its failed leadership.

But he also said that California officials — to the extent they can under the law, and working closely with Bonta — should work to refute the Trump administration’s claims through their own review of the data, just as Nevada officials did.

“We are not afraid to defend our elections,” he said. “And California should take that same approach. You cannot be reactive to these situations. You have to be strategic.”