A federal judge in California has put limits on the Department of Homeland Security's pre-election field operations aimed at finding noncitizens who voted illegally, ruling in a 19-page order late on Wednesday that the government is using flawed data and that the effort likely violated the Voting Rights Act, which bars voter intimidation, NPR reported. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that the government's use of unreliable and incomplete data, along with highly publicized arrests, leads to an objectively reasonable fear of law-enforcement entanglements that intimidates citizens from urging or aiding others to vote.

In recent weeks, armed Homeland Security Investigations officers have carried out field operations and visited homes to interview people suspected of illegally voting as noncitizens, NPR reported. The targets can include people who became citizens but are accused of voting before they naturalized. The judge cited a disclosure last month from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services whistleblower alleging rushed efforts to match data to create a target list of potential noncitizens on voter rolls, and that the list includes U.S. citizens. She also pointed to HSI social media posts, including one showing agents handcuffing a California man accused of unlawfully registering to vote.

Martínez-Olguín barred DHS officers in nine states — California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin — from conducting field operations targeting people they know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens, or that are based wholly on USCIS matching data without further investigation, according to NPR and CNN. CNN reported the judge wrote that DHS's data alleging hundreds of thousands of possible illegal voters is widely known to inadvertently include U.S. citizens. The order is set to take effect on Friday and remain in effect through election night, though the federal government could appeal.

DHS said in a statement, quoted by NPR: 'DHS is laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens. ONLY Americans should elect American leaders. We have no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.' The ruling came in a lawsuit filed last month by a coalition including San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, the city of San Francisco, nursing unions and the Voto Latino Foundation, litigated by Protect Democracy and the National Immigration Law Center. Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, 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.'

The order comes as the Department of Justice is suing California and demanding the state segregate 20,000 ballots from people federal officials say they believe are likely noncitizens. A preliminary review of a sample of that list by Los Angeles County election officials found many registrations were canceled, inactive or had no voting history, and some pertained to people who indicated they were born in the U.S., NPR reported. The DOJ on Monday announced charges against 28 green-card holders across California accused of illegally voting or registering to vote. Sources: NPR via KVCR (Oct. 22, 2026); CNN via KION (Oct. 21-22, 2026).