Civil rights groups went to federal court on Wednesday, October 28, asking a judge to shut down the Trump administration's "Unlawful Voter Initiative" — a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme that sends investigators after people suspected of voting without U.S. citizenship — just six days before the November 3 midterm elections.
Source: Reuters
The lawsuit was filed in California federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its affiliates, with other civil rights groups including Common Cause among those challenging the programme. It names as defendants the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and its director, Joseph Edlow. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.
The groups ask the court to vacate the initiative altogether and to order the destruction of records created and maintained under it. The complaint also seeks to stop DHS from demanding that state election officials refuse ballots to people whose names appear on the department's noncitizen voter lists, or refuse to count ballots those voters have cast.
What the initiative does
DHS launched the Unlawful Voter Initiative in August, directing USCIS personnel to generate lists of individuals to investigate for possibly voting without being a U.S. citizen. According to the lawsuit, the administration has deployed hundreds of investigators under the programme. Reuters reported on Wednesday that the administration has also issued more than 100 subpoenas for records on tens of thousands of voters in at least a dozen states as part of the effort to uncover noncitizen voting.
In the months since the initiative began, the Justice Department has brought more than 100 cases accusing individuals of noncitizen voting, and DHS announced on October 28 that ICE had arrested dozens of people in connection with alleged voter fraud. The administration has separately gone to court to prevent California from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it alleges are noncitizens, and federal prosecutors have asked Washington state to set aside ballots from 405 people they say are suspected noncitizens.
What the groups allege
The ACLU says the initiative has led to thousands of fully naturalized American citizens being subjected to improper investigations, door-to-door interrogations and potential disenfranchisement. The lawsuit alleges the programme violates the Civil Rights Act and federal laws governing privacy and administrative procedure, and that the administration is demanding states deny ballots based on flawed eligibility data. The complaint also cites a whistleblower report from last month describing immigration officers using unreliable information to create records stating that U.S. citizens voted before obtaining citizenship.
Source: Washington Sun
"The administration can't keep creating political stunts to sow distrust in our elections and lay the groundwork to question results they don't like," said Theresa Lee, an attorney with the ACLU's Voting Rights Project. Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, said: "This administration knows its data is flawed and unreliable, but they're using it anyway to scare eligible voters away from the polls."
The courts have already pushed back once
Last week, a federal judge in California concluded that DHS was using unreliable data to send federal agents to people's homes and restricted the department's door-knocking operations in nine states: California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington state and Wisconsin. The plaintiffs in Wednesday's lawsuit say those restrictions expire at the end of Election Day on November 3, which would leave the initiative free to be used in future federal elections. Earlier this week, a divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed, for now, the administration's emergency effort to force California to segregate the 20,000 mail ballots.
The administration's position
President Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted that noncitizen voting is widespread in U.S. elections — a claim Reuters noted has been widely debunked, and election experts quoted in coverage of the case describe noncitizen voting as extremely rare. Announcing the recent arrests, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: "The Trump Administration will not allow illegal aliens to steal the votes of hardworking American citizens. American elections are for Americans only." The administration's stated position is that the investigations target only people who voted unlawfully; the lawsuit's central dispute is over the reliability of the lists and the treatment of naturalized citizens caught up in them.
Why this matters for diaspora readers
A large share of the Punjabi diaspora in the United States votes as naturalized citizens — people who were born abroad and later took U.S. citizenship. The lawsuit is about exactly that group: it alleges that naturalized citizens, who are fully eligible to vote, are being investigated and visited at home because their names were matched against flawed data. Appearing on a government list is an allegation, not a finding: none of the voters named in the broader investigations has been shown, by that listing alone, to have done anything wrong, and the cases the Justice Department has brought remain allegations until a court decides them.
What happens next
The case now goes before a federal judge in California, who will decide whether the initiative can continue while the lawsuit proceeds; a ruling in the separate California ballot-segregation case was also expected on Wednesday. The midterm elections take place on Tuesday, November 3, and will decide whether Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress. The door-knocking restrictions imposed last week run only until the end of Election Day unless a court extends them, and DHS had not publicly responded to the new lawsuit as of Wednesday evening.