A judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to end its investigations into noncitizen voting in nine states.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled Wednesday that DHS’s data contains multiple inaccuracies and could be used to target U.S. citizens, The Washington Post reports. She barred the department from using the records in “elections-related field operations and field interviews,” but delayed the order, allowing the Trump administration until 5 p.m. Friday to appeal.
DHS agents have recently been spotted going door to door to look for noncitizen voters. Under the order, DHS would be barred from using the program to continue these operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.
According to the Post, the department-built target lists from commercial voter files, official state voter rolls, and other lists comprising 48.2 million voters that Martínez-Olguín, appointed by President Biden, said came from “questionable provenance.”
Because of pressure from administration officials, DHS employees were only given up to 12 minutes to clear someone from the list, Martínez-Olguín said. She ruled that this had a high likelihood of error because the government doesn’t keep a true master list of people living in the U.S. that includes their citizenship status.
Groups including the California Nurses Association sued the government, claiming that the White House was violating the Voting Rights Act by intimidating people who try to increase voter turnout or help with voting. Martínez-Olguín ruled that these groups had valid claims.
“The fear is objectively reasonable, and compounded by [DHS’s] use of data that is widely known to inadvertently include U.S. citizens, leaves citizens afraid that their name will be wrongly included in the hundreds of thousands identified for investigation,” Martínez-Olguín wrote.
Earlier this week, the Department of Justice admitted that its list of noncitizens who illegally voted in California may not be accurate, and officials in the state as well as Los Angeles County attested the same in court. That hasn’t stopped the federal government from arresting people based on that faulty information, though.