The Trump administration sued California over noncitizens on voter rolls

The lawsuit comes weeks before midterm elections and follows allegations of fraudulent non-citizen voting in various states.

US President Donald Trump's administration is suing the state of California after the state missed a deadline to review a list of registered non-citizen voters sent to officials.

In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in California, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials asked the court to block the counting of mail-in ballots from voters on a list shared with the state that the state says contains 20,000 noncitizens. The agency said it tried to "cooperate" with California to identify noncitizens who are registered to vote in the state, but "California made no serious effort to do so."

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The delisting action follows a 48-hour deadline the Justice Department gave California in letters sent to several county officials in the state on Tuesday, threatening to take further action if they do not review the list of eligible voters the agency said it shared.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the state's top election administrator, responded to the letters, saying in a three-page letter that she wanted to "set the record straight" about events since July. The state's top California official believes the administration is calling for "unprecedented" measures that threaten the voting rights of thousands of Californians, based on unverifiable information or methodology that you are still unable to explain or provide."

Weber said he was informed that the lists provided to local authorities included the names of about 20,000 people. Weber said no list was ever sent to his office. The Justice Department previously said "thousands" of registered voters were suspected of being noncitizens, and a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department earlier Thursday put the number at "tens of thousands."

"Despite not sending my office a list of alleged non-citizens, you are asking us to request that the list be sent, review and verify the citizenship status of each of the approximately 20,000 people on the list on the eve of the election and within just 48 hours," he wrote. "It's an urgency to create a DOJ."

In a statement Wednesday, election officials in Los Angeles County, one of the county offices that received the ultimatum from the Justice Department, noted that the threat was issued just 21 days before the midterm elections. The province's statement said it received a thumb drive with the letter and a handwritten note with what appeared to be a password, but made no attempt to access the drive because "we do not consider the device to be secure media."

The county office said maintaining accurate voter rolls is "a fundamental responsibility of our office" and that state law clearly requires removing people "based on verifiable information."

Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that large numbers of noncitizens who are legally ineligible to vote in federal elections are voting in Democratic-led states, including California. State officials, including in California, have said the number of such voters is small and the scale of the problem does not warrant intervention weeks before the election, which is scheduled for Nov. 3.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom slammed the Justice Department'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 state elections," Newsom said in a statement. We will defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and call out any authoritarian attempts to undermine our democracy.

Trump has long falsely claimed that noncitizen voting will cost him the 2020 election and blames it on Democrats, despite the fact that it's a rare occurrence.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that a federal law criminalizing noncitizen voting was unconstitutional, dealing a major setback to the Trump administration's efforts to pursue such cases against individuals.

The Court ruled that under the United States Constitution, only the individual states had the authority to determine the eligibility of voters, and each had already criminalized such voting by anyone who was not a citizen. It was therefore up to the state to try such persons. The Justice Department has at least 45 such cases across the country where the defendant can now raise the same challenge as the one raised in the Florida ruling.

Another federal judge ruled this month that the Justice Department illegally sought state voter rolls to cross-check them against a controversial federal immigration database to identify eligible voters. The Trump administration has often touted the Systematic Verification of Aliens for Eligibility (SAVE) database, but multiple reports suggest that the database is inaccurate and could identify citizens as noncitizens. The judge said it would be unconstitutional to force states to use such a database.

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's attempt to limit mail-in ballots for the Nov. 3 election, which Trump argued were particularly vulnerable to abuse by noncitizens because states could not verify who mailed them.

Two dozen Democratic-led states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration over efforts to limit mail-in voting, including an executive order ordering federal agencies such as the U.S. Postal Service not to process ballots sent to mailboxes without verifying their eligibility.

About 30 percent of all ballots in the 2024 election were mailed in, according to the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government agency. Mail ballots are used in many western states, including California.