Another day, another legal loss for the Trump administration. On Wednesday, a federal judge imposed significant restrictions on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from conducting field operations to find illegal voters.
The New York Times reports that DHS has been running its “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” which aims to find noncitizen voters. This initiative has involved DHS manually scouring voter rolls, impersonating people, and even knocking on doors at the homes of people they believe to be noncitizen voters. DHS has intensified these efforts in recent weeks ahead of next month’s midterms.
It’s wild that the Department of Homeland Security is spending so much time and money on a problem that is relatively rare. Especially when DHS has gone on record saying it inflated the number of noncitizen voters they have found.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin wrote that the efforts could potentially hamper voter participation. She also raised concerns that DHS used questionable evidence in its investigations.
From The New York Times:
Judge Martínez-Olguin stopped short of halting field operations. But she barred agents from carrying out interviews that “involve or are likely to involve persons” who agents “know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.” Given the unreliability of federal citizenship data at issue in the case, it was unclear how significantly that would hamper the department’s activities.
The interests of the entities suing, “and the public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation,” she wrote, “far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U. S. citizens.”
Internal documents introduced in the case indicated that agents were directed to focus on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
Source: Judge Blocks DHS From Visiting Homes Of Noncitizen Voters
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