Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, has issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from deploying field operations and interrogations related to the upcoming midterm elections in nine states across the country. The ruling suspends such actions in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The order expressly prohibits these operations and on-the-ground interrogations when they affect individuals that authorities "know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are United States citizens." The limitation also extends to actions based solely on records from the TECS system (Treasury Enforcement Communications System) generated by the "Voter Eligibility Matching Policy" against alleged citizens. This injunction will remain in effect until 8:00 PM (local time) on November 3, 2026, coinciding with the closing of polling places on election day.
With this decision, the court interrupts the "Illegal Voter Initiative," launched in August 2026 as part of the Trump Administration's strategy to prioritize the fight against alleged electoral fraud. Under this plan, the DHS had instructed Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents to conduct interviews regarding voter eligibility in the nine affected states.
Unreliable data and climate of fear
The lawsuit was filed, among others, by the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United (CNA/NNU), the city and county of San Francisco, Santa Clara County, and the Voto Latino Foundation. The judge concludes that the nurses' union has a high likelihood of succeeding in its claim that the Executive's actions violate Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits intimidation aimed at discouraging voter participation and mobilization.
According to the resolution, the Government created lists of target individuals from nearly 100 million records from different databases. The judge warns of a "high probability of error" in the filtering of those lists due to the absence of a federal citizenship database, which has led to U.S. citizens being mistakenly included as possible subjects of investigation.
The court argues that the use of this faulty information, combined with the deployment of armed agents to homes and the dissemination on social media of arrests by DHS, generates an "objectively reasonable" fear of facing criminal or police actions. This scenario of intimidation, it emphasizes, has caused U.S. citizens involved in the campaigns of the plaintiff organizations to abandon mobilization, information, and voter support tasks for fear of being investigated or arrested without cause.
Martínez-Olguín reasons that the public interest in ensuring safe and free elections outweighs the interest of federal authorities in pursuing fraud through these specific procedures. The suspension of operations ordered by DHS will begin to take effect at 5:00 PM (local time) this Friday, October 23.