A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday, October 30, unanimously denied the federal government's emergency motion to pause a preliminary injunction that bars the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from sending agents to the homes of people it knows or suspects are U.S. citizens to question them about voting. The ruling in California Nurses Association et al. v. Mullin et al. means the injunction stays in force through Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, when it expires automatically as the polls close.
Source: National Immigration Law Center, Oct. 30, 2026
The injunction covers nine states — California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. In those states, DHS cannot send agents after a person it knows or suspects is a U.S. citizen, and cannot target a home where it knows or suspects a citizen lives, for election-related field interviews. The order does not bar DHS from investigating unlawful voting itself; it bars the door-to-door operations aimed at likely citizens.
Source: Democracy Docket, Oct. 30, 2026
How the case reached this point
This is the latest step in a fight this newsroom has followed since it began. On October 21, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in the Northern District of California issued the preliminary injunction, finding that the nurses' unions who sued were likely to succeed on their claim that the field investigations violate Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act by intimidating voters. The government appealed on October 26, and on October 29 a Ninth Circuit panel heard arguments and pressed the Justice Department on why the home visits had to resume days before the election. Friday's order answers that argument: they do not resume.
Source: Democracy Docket case tracker; Awaaz Punjab earlier reporting, Oct. 21–29, 2026
What the judges said
The panel wrote that the plaintiffs' fear of the program “is reasonably exacerbated by two years of highly visible aggressive conduct by federal agents in immigration enforcement operations under this administration.” The court recognised, in the National Immigration Law Center's summary of the ruling, that DHS built its target lists from records known to be inaccurate that mislabelled U.S. citizens as noncitizens — the same flaw district courts had already identified in the lists.
Source: Ninth Circuit ruling, quoted by NILC and Democracy Docket, Oct. 30, 2026
The panel also concluded the government had failed to show it would suffer irreparable harm if the program stayed paused through Election Day, and it criticised the timing of the enforcement “Surge”: the administration had more than a year and a half to investigate past voter fraud, the judges noted, but escalated just as early voting began. “To the extent that Federal Defendants are focused on preventing illegally registered noncitizens from voting in the upcoming election, Defendants' delay in beginning the Surge has rendered it no longer practicable to prosecute anyone they could identify before Election Day,” the ruling reads.
Source: Democracy Docket, reporting the Ninth Circuit order, Oct. 30, 2026
The program behind the case
The lawsuit challenges what the plaintiffs call DHS's “Unlawful Voter Initiative” — an effort, run largely by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to identify alleged noncitizen voters and question them, including at their homes. According to court documents reported by Democracy Docket, the program used artificial intelligence and unverified commercial data to generate its target lists. The district court's October 21 order described those lists as drawn from 48.2 million records from independent sources and 50.6 million state and commercial records, and said agents working the nine-state Surge were told to complete at least 40 reviews, taking no more than about 12 minutes to clear a person from a list. The administration maintains it has the authority to investigate and prosecute unlawful voting, and DHS has said it does not intend to investigate people it believes are American citizens.
Source: Democracy Docket; Dispute Index summary of the Oct. 21 district court order
The plaintiffs — the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, suing on behalf of members who include many naturalized citizens, together with the Voto Latino Foundation, the City of San Francisco and Santa Clara County — argued the visits are voter intimidation aimed at eligible voters, including naturalized citizens flagged by faulty data. After Friday's ruling, Benjamin R. Farley, Supervisory Counsel for Democracy Defense at the National Immigration Law Center, said: “Today's decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sends a clear message that there's no space for voter intimidation in our elections.” Beau Tremitiere, counsel at Protect Democracy, said the government's “attempt to restart that campaign failed,” and Puneet Maharaj, executive director of National Nurses United, said the ruling “reinforces that all people should stand up to these desperate efforts by the Trump administration to interfere in the election.” Those are the plaintiffs' characterisations; the government disputes them.
Source: National Immigration Law Center statement, Oct. 30, 2026
Millions of immigrants become U.S. citizens through naturalization, including large Punjabi communities in California's Central Valley, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington and Georgia — five of the nine covered states. If you are a naturalized citizen in one of those states, this ruling means federal agents may not come to your home to question your voting eligibility, under this program, between now and the close of polls on November 3 — and your right to vote is unchanged. The ruling does not stop ordinary criminal investigations of actual unlawful voting, which remains a federal offence for noncitizens.
What happens next
The legal fight is not over. Moments after Friday's order was published, an unnamed Ninth Circuit judge asked the full circuit to vote on whether the case should be reheard by the full panel, Democracy Docket reported; if the full court declines, the administration is expected to seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court. Either way, the injunction itself expires when polls close on November 3, so any further ruling would matter mainly for the underlying lawsuit — which continues in the district court — and for a separate suit filed on October 28 by the ACLU, Common Cause and Asian American civil-rights groups against the same initiative, which is still pending. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.
Source: Democracy Docket, Oct. 30, 2026