A US judge on Monday temporarily barred the Trump administration from pressing ahead with a plan it says would prevent noncitizen voting, but which critics warn could disenfranchise eligible voters and intrude on states’ authority over elections.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan barred the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from sending states lists of registered voters the administration says may not be citizens. She also barred them from asking state election officials to separate out those voters’ ballots or to withhold them from counting until citizenship is proven.
The ruling comes a day before the 3 November midterm elections, in which President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans are defending their majorities in both houses of Congress. It is the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the administration’s efforts to assert greater federal control over election administration.
Over the past month, the administration stepped up pressure on election officials, sending letters to officials in California and Washington state demanding that they not count ballots from people named on lists of voters the administration said may not be citizens. Voting rights and privacy advocates then asked Chutkan to intervene, arguing that the disclosures would breach the Privacy Act of 1974, which restricts how the federal government can share sensitive private information.
The Justice Department argued in a court filing on Saturday that its letters were part of enforcing the federal law that bans noncitizen voting, and that they did not amount to a distinct policy that a court could review in this way. Chutkan, a Washington-based judge appointed by former Democratic President Barack Obama, found that the administration’s data may not be reliable, creating a risk that lawfully registered voters could be disenfranchised.
Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections, and the available evidence shows it is exceedingly rare. States, not the federal government, are responsible for administering elections, and Trump has long accused states of facilitating noncitizen voting, a claim Reuters notes is linked to his false assertion that his 2020 presidential election defeat was due to fraud.
Chutkan’s order follows other rulings against the administration in recent days, which are separate from her decision. A federal judge in Los Angeles rejected a Justice Department request to order California to set aside mailed ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it said were likely not citizens; an appeals court on Friday rejected the department’s request for an emergency order pending appeal; and a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday ordered the department to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who did not comply with its demands.
The order is temporary, and the Reuters report does not say how long it will remain in force or whether the administration will appeal. For now, however, it prevents the lists from being sent and the ballot-separation demands from being made while the challenge proceeds.
Note: the featured image is a file photo of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, taken in July 2012, not a photograph of Monday’s court proceedings.
Sources: Reuters, “Judge blocks Trump administration from pressuring states over noncitizen voting”, 3 November 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/judge-blocks-trump-administration-pressuring-states-over-noncitizen-voting-2026-11-03/
