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A Biden-appointed federal judge in California ruled Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security must halt certain investigations into suspected illegal voting, citing concerns over voter intimidation.
U.S. District Judge Araceli MartÃnez-OlguÃn, the jurist in question, was born in Mexico and nominated to the federal bench by President Joe Biden in 2022. Before becoming a federal judge, MartÃnez-OlguÃn spent about six years at the American Civil Liberties Union, a progressive civil rights organization, where she worked on women's and immigrants' rights issues.
The activist groups suing DHS "demonstrate[d] that they are likely to succeed in their claim that Defendants have run afoul of the Voting Rights Actâs prohibition of intimidating voter assistance and mobilization," according to MartÃnez-OlguÃn.
The publicâs "interests in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation, far exceed (the governmentâs) purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens," she added.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, maintained that noncitizen voting in federal elections is a crime and that DHS has statutory authority to investigate suspected violations. MartÃnez-OlguÃn did not find investigating noncitizen voting as itself unlawful, but instead argued that DHSâ methods likely violate the law as it used unreliable source data and sent armed agents to homes to conduct interviews, which could constitute intimidation.
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Lawyers representing the federal government conceded that some American citizens may have been looked at in connection with DHSâ investigations, but contended that in-person interviews were "expressly designed to resolve the discrepancies."
Noncitizen voting is rare, but cases of illegal voting have been documented. News broke earlier this year, for example, that New Jersey erroneously placed over 6,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls. The Justice Department announced charges against 16 individuals in September, including noncitizens accused of voting illegally in federal elections, and brought additional election-related charges in October.
MartÃnez-OlguÃnâs order blocks DHS from carrying out certain field investigations into suspected illegal voting involving U.S. citizens in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. Several of those states are led by Democrats who have opposed the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies, and some face high-profile elections in November.
Cracking down on illegal voting has been a priority for the second Trump administration, though it has yet to produce evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.
The judge delayed enforcement of her order until Friday, giving the Trump administration time to appeal, and set the restrictions to expire on Election Day unless otherwise ordered.
"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," a spokesperson for the department told Fox News Digital. "We have no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens."
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