Trump Administration Sues California Over Non-Citizen Voter Lists

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has sued the state of California after it failed to meet a deadline to review lists of registered non-citizen voters sent by federal authorities.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in a federal district court in California, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the court to block the state from counting mail-in ballots from voters on a list it says contains 20,000 non-citizens. The DOJ said it had tried to "cooperate" with California to identify non-citizens registered to vote, but that "California made no serious effort."

The move followed the DOJ's letters to officials in several California counties on Tuesday, setting a 48-hour deadline and threatening further action if they did not review the allegedly ineligible voter lists the agency said it had shared.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the state's top election official, responded to the letters. In a three-page document, she said she wanted to "set the record straight" about events dating back to July. She asserted that federal authorities were demanding "unprecedented measures that threaten the voting rights of thousands of Californians, based on information or methods you have still not explained or provided."

According to Weber, she was told the lists sent to local officials contained the names of about 20,000 individuals, but no list had ever been sent to her office. Previously, the DOJ said it suspected "thousands" of voters had registered as non-citizens; another lawsuit filed by the Justice Department the same day cited a figure of "tens of thousands."

"Despite not sending the list of alleged non-citizens to my office, you are asking us to request the transfer of the list, review it, and confirm the citizenship status of each of the roughly 20,000 individuals, right before an election and within just 48 hours," Weber wrote. "This is an emergency of the DOJ's own making."

In a statement Wednesday, Los Angeles County election officials, one of the county offices that received the DOJ ultimatum, stressed that the threat was issued just 21 days before the midterm elections. The county's statement said they received a USB drive with the letter and a handwritten note containing what appeared to be a password, but would not access the device because "we do not consider this a secure medium."

The county office said maintaining accurate voter lists is their "fundamental responsibility," and that state law clearly requires that removing individuals be "based on verifiable information."

Trump has repeatedly made false claims that large numbers of non-citizens, who are ineligible to vote in federal elections, are voting in Democratic-led states, including California. State officials, including California's, say the number of such voters is negligible and the scale of the problem does not justify intervention just weeks before the election scheduled for Nov. 3.

California Governor Gavin Newsom sharply criticized the DOJ's lawsuit against his state, calling it a "sad and desperate attempt" by Trump to "suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day."

"The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in running state elections," Newsom said in a statement. "We will protect free and fair elections in the Golden State and speak out against any authoritarian effort to undermine our democracy."

Trump has long falsely claimed that non-citizen voting cost him the 2020 election, blaming Democrats, even though the practice is extremely rare.

Courts Have Pushed Back Against Trump

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that a federal law criminalizing voting by non-citizens is unconstitutional, dealing a heavy blow to the Trump administration's efforts to prosecute individuals in such cases.

The court determined that under the U.S. Constitution, only states have the power to set voter qualifications, and each state has criminalized non-citizen voting. Therefore, prosecuting such individuals falls under state jurisdiction. The DOJ currently has at least 45 similar cases pending nationwide, where defendants could raise arguments similar to those in the Florida ruling.

Another federal judge ruled this month that the DOJ unlawfully sought to obtain states' voter lists to cross-check them against a controversial federal immigration database to identify ineligible voters. The Trump administration has often praised the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, but multiple reports indicate it is inaccurate and can mislabel citizens as non-citizens. The judge said forcing states to use such a database is unconstitutional.

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's effort to restrict mail-in voting for the Nov. 3 election. Trump argued that the method is especially vulnerable to abuse by non-citizens because states cannot verify who sends the ballots.

Twenty-four Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration over efforts to restrict mail-in voting, including an executive order directing federal agencies such as the U.S. Postal Service not to process mail-in ballots without verifying voter eligibility.

According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government agency, about 30% of all ballots in the 2024 election were cast by mail. Mail-in voting is even more widely used in many Western states such as California.