President Trump’s attempts to block noncitizens from casting ballots may be striking out in the courts, but there is a good chance he has scared many of them into staying home rather than risking criminal prosecution or deportation.
The Justice Department has shattered records with a wave of prosecutions for noncitizen voting in recent weeks, and the Homeland Security Department has filled in the gaps by bringing deportation cases against those whose votes took place beyond the five-year federal criminal statute of limitations.
The result is unprecedented attention on the issue and an implicit warning to anyone who might be tempted to vote despite lacking citizenship.
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“Arresting alien voters for effectively the first time is the first disincentive [to voting] in memory,” said Christian Adams, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s voting section and now president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
The prevalence of noncitizen voting remains heatedly contested.
Democrats’ claims that it is a nonexistent issue have been blown away by the dozens of cases charged each week this fall, and by Homeland Security’s revelation that it had 1,620 active investigations as of mid-September.
At the same time, there is scant evidence for Mr. Trump’s suggestion that noncitizen votes have swayed elections, though Republicans maintain that the volume of cases warrants continued investigation.
The president’s efforts to block ballots at the source have encountered universal roadblocks in the courts.
The latest setbacks appeared last week in Mr. Trump’s bid to sequester some 20,000 mail ballots sent to California residents the federal government says were ineligible noncitizens on the state’s rolls.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision Friday, said Mr. Trump was trampling on states’ power to run their own elections.
“We decline the United States’ invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion.
Hours later, a federal district court in California blocked Justice Department warnings that it could pursue cases against election officials who count noncitizen ballots.
U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson called that an effort at “intimidation” and temporarily forbade any steps to enforce the warnings, with the order in effect through Nov. 16.
“When state and local government employees perform the work of distributing, processing, or counting ballots or otherwise administering the 2026 midterm election in the manner required by their state and federal laws governing the administration of elections, they do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by defendants to be ineligible to vote,” she wrote.
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump’s plans to use the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots the government suspected of being mailed to or from noncitizens also crumbled in the courts.
The Justice Department also filed 31 lawsuits to obtain access to states’ voter lists, hoping to match them against Homeland Security databases to spot noncitizens.
The department has lost 27 of the cases that have reached a ruling, with others still pending. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has also ruled to block access to the main Homeland Security database, calling it a violation of privacy laws.
Left-leaning voting rights groups say the effect of the Trump efforts goes beyond noncitizens and will discourage even some naturalized citizens from voting.
They have labeled Mr. Trump’s full-court press a thinly veiled effort at voter suppression.
The Justice Department’s pursuit of noncitizens has far outstripped anything before.
According to Justice Department data released this week, just 13 criminal cases were brought against noncitizen voters across four years under President Biden. The Trump administration’s Justice Department filed 64 cases over approximately five weeks this fall, according to a senior Justice Department official.
The courts invited him to keep prosecuting noncitizen voters in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, saying that — not blocking the ballots — is the answer to noncitizen voting.
“There is a clear remedy available,” wrote Judge David Carter, who blocked the sequester of the 20,000 California ballots. “The United States can prosecute individuals according to Section 611, as it has historically and recently done.”
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