Civil rights groups sued Wednesday to stop the Department of Homeland Security from investigating foreign-born citizens as part of the voter fraud probe intensifying ahead of the midterm elections next week.
The lawsuit also seeks to prevent DHS from demanding that state officials refuse to provide ballots to people who appear on its noncitizen voter list or not count those ballots.
The groups filed the lawsuit as the Trump administration has demanded that California and Washington state segregate ballots from people DHS suspects aren’t citizens.
The department has touted arrests for voter fraud of legal permanent residents and immigrants without legal status. Federal agents have also gone door-knocking in the search for cases of noncitizens voting, which is extremely rare.
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DHS’s voter fraud investigation targets naturalized citizens and exposes them to disenfranchisement, the civil rights groups argue.
“This administration knows its data is flawed and unreliable, but they’re using it anyway to scare eligible voters away from the polls. It’s a deliberate effort to spread unfounded lies and make people doubt our elections,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of Common Cause, in a press release. “When even one voter is targeted, all of us are at risk.”
The lawsuit cites a whistleblower report last month about immigration officers using unreliable information to create records stating U.S. citizens voted before obtaining citizenship.
Local election officials in California have questioned the accuracy of DHS’s list of likely noncitizen voters, CalMatters reported. A federal judge in the state concluded last week that DHS was using unreliable data to send federal agents to people’s homes, restricting DHS door-knocking operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington state and Wisconsin.
Earlier this week, a divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed for now the Trump administration’s emergency effort to force California to segregate 20,000 mail ballots from voters the administration suspects are not citizens. A judge is expected to issue a ruling in that case Wednesday.
In a press release on the recent arrests, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: “The Trump Administration will not allow illegal aliens to steal the votes of hardworking American citizens. American elections are for Americans only.”
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