Federal Judge Bars Justice and Homeland Security Departments From Pressuring Election Officials Days Before Midterms

A federal judge in California on Friday evening barred the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from pressuring state and local election officials in the final days before the midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, of the Northern District of California, granted a temporary restraining order that blocks the two departments from demanding that election officials segregate ballots, purge voters from the rolls, or halt ballot processing. The order also bars the departments from threatening election officials with criminal prosecution and from taking other actions that “threaten, intimidate or coerce” officials into changing how ballots are processed based on claims that voters are ineligible.

“Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters,” Thompson wrote in her opinion, according to CNN.

What the order requires

Thompson wrote that state and local workers who distribute, process, or count ballots, or otherwise administer the 2026 midterm election, in line with the law “do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote.” The order also requires the administration to tell the court about any search warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas, or other demands to obtain election materials or ballots tied to lists the administration has drawn up of people it claims are ineligible to vote. The Wall Street Journal reported that Thompson also told the Justice Department to inform officials it had contacted that its demands and threats had been enjoined. The order is set to expire November 16.

How the case reached the court

The case was brought by a coalition of labor unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens, which argued the administration’s recent conduct violates the Voting Rights Act and intrudes on state control over election administration. The Wall Street Journal reported that a union representing California election workers sued the Justice Department a day earlier over its letters and a series of subpoenas to officials in the state.

At the center of the dispute is a data-matching operation run by the Department of Homeland Security that has compared state voter lists with federal records. Election officials say the lists of suspected noncitizens produced by that program are unreliable and include U.S. citizens, according to CNN. The Justice Department has also sent letters to 29 states and Washington, D.C., threatening investigations and demanding that they preserve records and voter data from the 2024 election, even though federal law already requires jurisdictions to keep such records for 22 months after an election.

The ruling follows another court setback for the administration in California this week. A federal appeals court kept 20,000 disputed California ballots in the count in a 2-1 ruling, and the administration lost a third legal bid on Friday to have those ballots segregated, according to the Wall Street Journal. CNN said it had reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Reporting based on coverage by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg Law.