A federal judge in California on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, rejected the Trump administration's request for a temporary restraining order that would have forced California to set aside and not count ballots from about 20,000 people the Department of Justice alleges may be noncitizens. U.S. District Judge David Carter's decision came one day after a high-profile, three-hour-plus hearing in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon, and it preserves the status quo while voting is already well underway in the universal vote-by-mail state.

Source: Democracy Docket

"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. "In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too."

Why the judge said no

Carter concluded that the Justice Department was unlikely to succeed on multiple fronts. He found that the government likely lacks standing and a cause of action, that the federal criminal prohibition on noncitizen voting does not give the department authority to override California's ballot-processing rules, and that the requested remedy would likely violate several federal voting laws. He also rejected the government's claim of an emergency, writing that its eleventh-hour predicament was "solely due to its own neglect."

How the fight reached this courtroom

The legal back-and-forth began in July, when the Department of Homeland Security said it had identified 190,832 potential noncitizen voters on California's rolls. By October, that number had been lowered to about 20,000 names, sent to the Los Angeles County clerk on a password-protected thumb drive, with instructions to hold the ballots of listed voters until their citizenship could be verified. The Justice Department sued California and Los Angeles County on October 15, after state officials rebuffed a 48-hour deadline to review the list of individuals the federal government called "likely noncitizens."

Source: The Washington Sun

California and Los Angeles County officials have challenged the reliability of the federal list. When county officials conducted a preliminary review of 200 people on the list, nearly 40 percent had records indicating they were born in the United States, and more than 70 percent of the sample had no voting history at all. At Tuesday's hearing, Michael Cohen, an attorney for the state, told the judge that the U.S. Attorney's office had relied on "data and methods known to be unreliable."

At that hearing, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli argued for the government that prosecutors had "found credible evidence of persons we suspect are non-citizens" registered to vote by mail, and accused Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan of allowing the "co-mingling" of lawful and unlawful ballots. Carter was openly sceptical. "You've got a remedy for goodness sake," he told federal officials. "Go out and indict." He noted that election officials have until December 3 — the certification deadline — to resolve questions, said he intended to appoint a special master to independently examine the government's list, and warned that any threats to state and county election employees should "cease immediately."

Source: MyNewsLA

The administration had also tried to sidestep district-court review altogether, filing an unusual appeal before Carter had even held a hearing. The Ninth Circuit dismissed that request as premature on Monday in a 2-1 decision, and two judges in the majority — including one appointed by President Donald Trump — wrote separately that they would have rejected the emergency request even if the court had jurisdiction. Those opinions are not binding on any future appeal of Carter's ruling, but they previewed many of the same problems he identified on Wednesday.

Why it matters beyond California

The ruling is a significant blow to the administration's wider effort to intervene in the midterm elections, with Election Day on November 3. Attorney General Todd Blanche recently threatened similar California-style lawsuits targeting live ballots in "a number of states," and the administration sent a similar demand to Washington state, asking it to withhold ballots from more than 400 people it accused of being noncitizens illegally registered to vote. California officials have already processed hundreds of thousands of ballots, and the state is home to a number of competitive congressional races this cycle. For naturalised citizens — including Punjabi-American voters in the Central Valley and other diaspora communities who vote by mail in large numbers — the order means ballots cast under California's rules continue to be processed normally.

What happens next

Carter's order preserves the status quo; it does not end the underlying lawsuit. At Tuesday's hearing the judge indicated he would set a further hearing in the next two weeks, and he intends to appoint a special master to examine both the government's list and California's claim that counties cannot practically segregate the ballots. The government can appeal Wednesday's ruling, and Carter said the Justice Department remains free to prosecute individual noncitizens when it has evidence they voted illegally — the department says it has charged 28 people in California under "Operation Protect the Vote" — but it cannot substitute its preferred procedures for those enacted by Congress and California. "The Executive's requested relief," Carter wrote in closing, "would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens. This Court declines to be a party to such process."