Twelve days before Americans vote, a Biden-appointed federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to pull back from one of its main tools for finding noncitizens on the voter rolls.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled late Wednesday that DHS may not rely solely on records from its voter-matching program to run field operations involving people it knows, suspects or should reasonably suspect are citizens. The order covers nine states: California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. She put it on hold until 5 p.m. Friday so the administration can appeal.
Meet Judge Araceli Martinez Olguín… She was appointed by Autopen. Born in Mexico. There’s NO RECORD her parents immigrated to America legally. They could be illegals. Araceli just barred DHS doing field interrogations of potential illegals. The Judiciary is a disaster. https://t.co/FV2xCmjpDp
— C3 (@C_3C_3) October 22, 2026
Who sued, and what the judge bought
The plaintiffs are two nurses’ unions, the left-leaning Voto Latino Foundation, Santa Clara County and the City and County of San Francisco. Their lawyer is from Protect Democracy, a left-leaning legal group.
The judge sided with their claim that the DHS effort likely violates the Voting Rights Act’s ban on intimidating people who help register or turn out voters. She called citizens’ fear “objectively reasonable” and warned of a “high likelihood of error” because there is no federal database of every resident’s citizenship status.
She also faulted how DHS built its target lists: state voter rolls, commercial voter files and AI tools, with personnel told to complete at least 40 reviews and given no more than 12 minutes per person, according to the Washington Post’s account of the ruling.
What DHS has been finding
The administration isn’t chasing ghosts. This summer, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to four states saying DHS had identified more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote, including 190,832 in California alone. “Only Americans should be electing American leaders,” Mullin said.
On Monday, the Justice Department charged 28 noncitizens in California with illegally registering, voting or lying on naturalization papers, and arrested 11. “At least eight of these defendants allegedly voted more than once illegally,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said. Every one of the 28 appeared on a list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants DOJ had handed to California officials. The state refused to review that list, and DOJ sued last week.
A DHS spokesperson said the department is “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens,” and has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.” In court, the government said DHS “reasonably decided to make use of the best data it had available to it.”
The other side
The plaintiffs say DHS operations are scaring lawful voters and the groups that help them. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla released a whistleblower report last month claiming DHS relied on “highly questionable data.”
The bottom line
Read the ruling’s logic again. The judge says DHS can’t trust its matches because no federal database cleanly tracks citizenship. That isn’t a reason to stop checking. It’s proof the system was never built to keep noncitizens off the rolls, and somebody finally decided to try.
Eight people in a single California sweep allegedly voted more than once. California sat on a list of 20,000 names. And the response from a federal judge, less than two weeks out, is to tie the hands of the agency doing the checking in nine states, including battlegrounds Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Every illegal ballot cancels out a citizen’s vote. That is the real voter intimidation, and it’s time a court started treating it that way.