DOJ to appeal judge’s order to hand over list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California

The Department of Justice (DOJ) said it would soon appeal a federal judge’s order requiring it to turn over a list of around 20,000 alleged noncitizens registered to vote in California to an immigrant rights group seeking to verify the list’s accuracy.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had ordered the department to turn over the list to the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights by 5 p.m. ET Friday. However, the department let the deadline pass and instead informed the judge it would appeal his order.

In its motion for a stay, the DOJ claimed that disclosing the list — which allegedly contains the names, birthdates and addresses of thousands of people — to the coalition could interfere with “pending” investigations “by informing individuals who are subjects or witnesses.” It added that turning over the list would moot its right to appeal.

“As a general rule, the Department of Justice does not confirm, deny, or release information about pending investigations, both to protect the integrity of any investigation and the rights of any accused,” it wrote.

In ordering the transfer, Boasberg stipulated that the coalition could “neither disclose names on the list to anyone nor inform any person that his or her name is on the list” after receiving the document.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights has argued the list would help establish its standing to challenge the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure California and other states to screen voter rolls for alleged noncitizens.

It filed its suit in September together with two recently naturalized citizens who said they feared being wrongfully flagged by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as noncitizens ineligible to vote in the midterm elections.

The lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration’s campaign to scour state voter registration lists for noncitizens is based on unsupported claims, risks wrongly targeting naturalized citizens and unlawfully interferes with states’ authority to administer elections.

The DOJ has refused to disclose in detail how the federal government identified the 20,000 alleged noncitizens. The department has broadly said that DHS produced the list through an extensive review of California’s voter roll.

The review involved federal agents attempting to find potential matches between hundreds of thousands of voters on the state’s registration roll and people in federal immigration records. However, the list appears to have been created using a deeply flawed initiative recently disclosed by a whistleblower inside DHS.

The anonymous DHS employee specifically alleged that the initiative was “knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters’” and that it posed a particular risk for Californians.

The DOJ sued California and Los Angeles County election officials in a bid to bar them from counting ballots from the 20,000 alleged noncitizens.

A preliminary analysis of a 7,035-person sample of the list by Los Angeles County found that roughly 1 in 4 people marked the U.S. as their birthplace, a strong indicator that they were citizens.