In the weeks before the November 3 election, the Trump administration sent Homeland Security agents to people's front doors. The agents asked about their immigration status and whether they had voted in recent elections. Homeland Security Investigations posted photos and videos of its agents approaching homes in several states.
Late Wednesday, a federal judge ordered it stopped.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin ruled that the practice likely violates the Voting Rights Act, CBS News reported. She ordered the department to halt its "elections-related field operations and field interviews" in nine states, when the people involved are ones agents "know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens."
What the judge found
The case was brought by National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association, which help people register and vote. The judge found the program likely broke the part of the Voting Rights Act that makes it illegal to "intimidate, threaten, or coerce" people who help others vote.
She didn't say the government can't look into illegal voting. What the nurses' groups asked her to stop, in her words, was DHS investigating U.S. citizens, "who have a legal right to vote, in a way that intimidates and threatens" their members' work urging and helping others to vote.
The nine states are California, New York, Missouri, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin, according to Common Dreams.
The lists were bad
When the Trump administration demanded voter data, state and local election officials turned it away. So DHS built its own lists of who to go after, by matching commercial data against federal records. The judge called the result "voluminous and unreliable."
Nevada shows how bad it got. Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his agency had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's voter rolls. DHS then sent the state a list of 185 people it said had registered improperly. A Nevada deputy attorney general wrote back that records showed all 185 were citizens. "You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise," he wrote.
"It was clear from the start that DHS built its lists on bad data, never checked how often it was wrong, and recklessly sent agents to people's homes weeks before an election," said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, which also sued over the policy.
The problem they were "solving" is tiny
Voting by noncitizens is already illegal. And it is very rare. The Justice Department says just 156 people have been charged with voting-fraud offenses since Trump took office. In California this week, the Justice Department charged 28 lawful permanent residents with crimes including submitting fraudulent voter registrations. California has 23 million registered voters, so that's about 0.0001% of them.
So the administration sent agents to knock on Americans' doors, weeks before an election, to chase a problem that barely exists, using lists it never checked. We've written before about how Republicans manufactured this voter-fraud crisis on purpose. Earlier this month, we also reported that Trump's immigration agents reviewed 82 Pennsylvania nonprofits over voter registration, and weighed sending in undercover agents.
What the ruling shows
In the weeks before the 2026 election, Trump's Homeland Security Department sent agents door to door in several states, asking people about their immigration status and whether they'd voted. A federal judge ordered it halted in nine states, found it likely violated the Voting Rights Act's ban on voter intimidation and called the department's target lists "voluminous and unreliable." In Nevada, every one of the 185 people DHS flagged turned out to be a citizen.
