Judge Halts DHS Door-Knock Sweeps of Voters in Nine States

Federal agents knocking on doors weeks before a national election sounds like a movie plot, but Homeland Security Investigations officers have spent recent weeks doing exactly that. In a nineteen-page order issued late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that the DHS door-knock sweeps targeting suspected noncitizen voters likely violate the Voting Rights Act, according to NPR's Jude Joffe-Block.

The order limits field operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin, states where the agency had planned interviews of people it suspected of voting illegally as noncitizens.

The DHS door-knock sweeps were not subtle. Armed HSI officers showed up at homes to question residents about their immigration status and voting history, and the targets could include people who had since become citizens but voted before they naturalized. The judge pointed to the agency's own social media posts, including one that showed agents handcuffing a California man accused of registering unlawfully. A whistleblower from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services disclosed last month that the agency rushed its data-matching to build a target list of potential noncitizens on the rolls, and that the list includes American citizens, according to the disclosure cited in the ruling.

Martínez-Olguín, appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden, wrote that the government was relying on what she called flawed data. She found that the unreliable lists, paired with highly publicized arrests, create what she described as an objectively reasonable fear of entanglement with law enforcement, one that intimidates citizens from urging or aiding others to exercise their right to vote. That is the core of the Voting Rights Act claim: the law protects not only voters but the people who help them get to the ballot box. The DHS door-knock sweeps, the judge concluded, threatened exactly those helpers.

What the injunction actually covers

The order bars DHS officers in the nine states from field operations targeting people they know, suspect, or should reasonably suspect are citizens. It also blocks operations based entirely on USCIS matching data without further investigation. The judge stayed the ruling until Friday afternoon to give the administration time to appeal, and if it survives, the order stays in force through election night, according to legal coverage of the ruling that cites Associated Press confirmation of the scope. A USCIS official, Nicolas Bartell, told the court in a declaration that his team reviews records by hand before referring cases to HSI, while acknowledging what he called a low possibility that citizens could be wrongly flagged as possible noncitizens in federal records. The judge stressed the limit of her ruling: federal officials may still investigate unlawful voting itself, but the DHS door-knock sweeps may not keep sweeping up citizens on the way.

The shaky data underneath the crackdown

The data the government leaned on has been falling apart in public. The Justice Department has also sued California, demanding the state set aside twenty thousand ballots from people federal officials believe are likely noncitizens, but a preliminary review by Los Angeles County election officials found many of those registrations canceled, inactive, or with no voting history, and some belonged to people who said they were born in the United States.

On Monday, the department announced charges against twenty-eight green card holders in California accused of voting or registering unlawfully. State reviews and audits have consistently found voting by noncitizens to be extremely rare, even as the DHS door-knock sweeps treated it as a live threat in nine states.

Both sides reacted fast to the ruling on the DHS door-knock sweeps. DHS said in a statement that it was laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing noncitizens who vote, writing that only Americans should elect American leaders, and that it had no plans to question or investigate people it believed to be citizens.

On the other side, Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, one of the groups litigating the case, said the court had affirmed that citizens, whether born in the country or naturalized, should be able to vote without armed government agents harassing them. "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," Tremitiere said in a statement. A court filing by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, two of the plaintiffs, described naturalized citizen members who no longer wanted to attend political rallies, work the polls, or vote in person because of the DHS door-knock sweeps.

The case is being litigated by Protect Democracy and the National Immigration Law Center against the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. The plaintiffs include San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, the city of San Francisco, nursing unions and the Voto Latino Foundation. The order takes effect Friday afternoon, leaving the government two days to seek an emergency appeal. Until then, the DHS door-knock sweeps that brought armed agents to voters' doors stay paused while early voting is underway.

Related reading: according to earlier GenZNewZ reporting, a separate federal ruling halted the Justice Department's national voter-roll purge plan, while the department's California operation charged twenty-eight green card holders this week. The same federal push over voter data also includes the revived SAVE citizenship-check system, which the Supreme Court allowed to continue pending appeal.