A Judge Limits DHS Field Operations Aimed at Noncitizen Voters in Nine States
A federal judge in California has put limits on pre-election field operations by the Department of Homeland Security, which says the operations are meant to find noncitizens who voted illegally in nine states.
The order bars DHS officers in those states from running field operations against people they know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens, and from operations based wholly on USCIS matching data without further investigation.
The judge's reasoning is about deterrence: unreliable and incomplete data, combined with highly publicized arrests, the judge wrote, creates an objectively reasonable fear of entanglement with law enforcement that intimidates citizens from urging or helping others to vote.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
''Wholly'' is the word to watch. A matching-data hit on its own is out; add some real checking and the agents can knock again. The order disciplines the paper trail more than the premise behind it.
Which leaves the scale looking strange: nine states of field operations aimed at a category of voting that state reviews and audits have consistently found to be extremely rare. Right or wrong on the law, that mismatch is the story.