Armed federal agents have been knocking on voters’ doors to ask whether they are citizens and whether they voted. Late Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the practice likely violates the Voting Rights Act, and ordered it stopped in nine states before polls close on Nov. 3.
Georgia is one of the nine, with a large Black electorate. The NAACP has a separate suit pending in Washington that says Black voters are among those now afraid to cast a ballot.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, in San Francisco, found that the Department of Homeland Security’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative” likely runs afoul of the part of the 1965 law that bars anyone from intimidating, threatening or coercing people who vote or help others vote. Her order blocks DHS from field operations and interviews in the nine states, including California and New York, when they target people officials know, suspect or should reasonably suspect are U.S. citizens. She stayed it until 5 p.m. Friday so the government could seek an appeal.
“Rather, Plaintiffs seek to stop DHS from continuing to investigate U.S. citizens, who have a legal right to vote, in a way that intimidates and threatens,” she wrote. She also pointed to a “high likelihood of error” in how DHS builds its lists of targets, which draw on government and commercial data.
The California Nurses Association and National Nurses United brought the case with Protect Democracy. DHS said it is “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote” and has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”
The numbers are what the judge was looking at. Homeland Security Investigations, the ICE unit that normally handles drug and human trafficking, ran the sweep from September to mid-October in Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut, as the Latin Times reported. Its lists come from SAVE, a citizenship database overhauled in 2025 to screen voter rolls in bulk. In Nevada, DHS flagged 185 people as possible noncitizens. State officials said their records showed all 185 were U.S. citizens, according to reporting by IBTimes.
Fewer than 150 noncitizen-voting referrals have reached prosecutors nationwide, and 41 produced charges, the Latin Times reported. Washington’s secretary of state, Steve Hobbs, said his state has had five confirmed voter-fraud cases from 2008 to 2025, a period in which about 90 million ballots were cast.
The judge’s order is not framed around race. But the NAACP and a coalition filed suit Sept. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that voters “particularly Black, Latino, and Asian voters, naturalized citizens, and members of mixed-status families” are afraid to vote. That case was consolidated Oct. 23 with two others, with the League of United Latin American Citizens’ suit as the lead.
Georgia has seen door-to-door voter questioning aimed at Black residents before, from local officials. In 2016, the Hancock County elections board in Sparta sent deputies with summonses to more than 180 Black residents, about a fifth of the town’s registered voters, demanding they prove where they lived or lose their right to vote.
Early voting is under way in most of the country. The judge’s order holds through Election Day unless an appeals court lifts it.
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