The Justice Department confirmed in a court filing late Wednesday that FBI and ICE agents will not be deployed as election monitors at polling places on Election Day, but that employees from other federal law enforcement agencies will serve as monitors.

“There will be no Federal Bureau of Investigation or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, much less agents, serving as monitors,” the Justice Department said in a declaration filed with the court. It added that one Customs and Border Protection employee will serve as a monitor on behalf of the Civil Rights Division “pursuant to detail and not as a representative” of the Department of Homeland Security.

The court filing came in response to a lawsuit against the Trump administration filed, in part by the NAACP, to block the Justice Department from deploying federal agents to polling places during the midterm elections.

The Justice Department also said that employees from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Prisons “will serve as monitors.” The declaration was filed by Eric Neff, acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, who has previously promoted false claims about the 2020 election.

“It’s not normal for those types of federal officials to serve as monitors,” Justin Levitt, a former DOJ attorney who helped oversee the election monitor program during the Obama administration, told MS NOW. “But they’re still just there only to observe, and can (and will) still be tossed out of the polls if they disrupt or disturb or intimidate.”

The Justice Department’s decision to pull employees from those agencies to act as monitors comes after the department announced in August it would deploy 1,000 federal monitors for the 2026 midterms. The announcement drew concern from Democratic lawmakers in Congress, and voting rights advocates over the scope of the operation and its potential for voter intimidation.

State election officials have told MS NOW that the federal election monitors are not their top concern when it comes to federal interference from the Trump administration. Monitors can be removed from polling sites if they are disruptive, and states determine the level of access federal poll monitors have to observe voting.

Levitt said the Justice Department is likely struggling to get to the 1,000 election monitors promised by Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Civil Rights Division, and is tapping ATF and DEA employees “as an attempt to get warm bodies.”

“Someone promised the boss 1,000 people, and then couldn’t come up with 1,000 people,” he said.

DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels previously told MS NOW that no other federal officials or federal law enforcement agents would accompany the DOJ monitors in their deployment at polling places. The election monitors will be DOJ attorneys and criminal prosecutors, the Justice Department told MS NOW.

Dispatching prosecutors as monitors is unusual, as typically only civil attorneys serve in that role.

The post DOJ says FBI and ICE agents will not serve as poll monitors appeared first on MS NOW.

The Department of Justice is now targeting Washington state, threatening election officials with legal action if they do not set aside ballots the Trump administration believes could be cast by noncitizens.

In a letter to Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs that was obtained by MS NOW, the Justice Department said it found 400 alleged noncitizens who, “with a high level of confidence, have voted in elections” in the state.

The federal prosecutors demanded that Washington’s top election official review the list “within 24 hours” to determine whether there are citizens on it, and to set aside any ballots returned by suspected noncitizens. Acting U.S. Attorney in Washington Neil Floyd and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Pete Serrano told Hobbs to instruct local election officials “to not verify the signature and/or tabulate the ballot until citizenship can be determined.”

“The United States is concerned with the number of noncitizen voters, both enrolled and actively voting in the State of Washington, as allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” Floyd and Serrano wrote, adding that “we do make criminal referrals to our state counterparts.”

If the state’s top election official does not comply, the letter states, “the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief.” Washington began mailing ballots in mid-October.

With just seven days until Election Day, Washington is the second Democratic-led state to be targeted by the Trump administration with such a letter. The Justice Department sued California earlier this month over its refusal to segregate ballots from some 20,000 people the administration claims are noncitizens.

In another election challenge, the Justice Department sued Alaska last week to block the results of the U.S. Senate election if the Republican incumbent, whose Democratic challenger has the same name, does not win.

Federal prosecutors said in the letter to Washington state election officials that the “individuals identified are or were noncitizens,” adding that “they may have subsequently naturalized.” The department said it expects to soon receive “a second list of individuals believed to be noncitizens who are registered to vote” from the Department of Homeland Security that it will share with state election officials.

The letter includes several errors. The election date is wrong, written by the federal prosecutors as Nov. 2, 2026, when Election Day is Nov. 3. The federal attorneys also misspelled voter rolls, writing “voter roles” when referring to the Justice Department’s attempts to obtain sensitive voter data from the state.

In a press release Monday, Floyd said the 400 alleged noncitizens “are registered to vote and have voted in multiple elections.”

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” Floyd said. Many of the people on the list are lawful permanent residents or “green card” holders, Floyd’s office said.

The Washington secretary of state’s office said it is carefully reviewing the Justice Department’s request.

“We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process,” Hobbs said in a statement. “We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”

Hobbs said the timing of the request “is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results. At the same time, thousands of voters were recently disenfranchised in our August Primary due to delayed postmarks.”

Helen Smith, a spokesperson for Hobbs, noted that the DOJ system frequently flags U.S. citizens as noncitizens, risking their right to vote.

The post Washington becomes second state threatened by Justice Department over mail ballots appeared first on MS NOW.

The Trump administration’s threats against states over alleged noncitizen voting have reached a crescendo just eight days from the midterm elections, with Justice Department officials claiming such cases have risen to “emergency” proportions in California.

But MS NOW has found the number of federal prosecutions based on allegations of noncitizen voting remains low in the state — and across the country.

Three weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department sent California a password-protected thumb drive that identified more than 20,000 individuals it believed to be noncitizens registered to vote in the state.

The delivery came with a warning: It wasn’t just noncitizen voters the DOJ would come after; anyone who had participated in tabulating that ballot — including state officials or poll workers — would be seen as aiding and abetting an offense and criminally liable.

And last week, DOJ and Homeland Security officials were in Los Angeles to announce 28 criminal cases against lawful permanent residents, each of whom, officials said, appeared on the federal list of 20,000 likely noncitizens registered in California.

But those 28 announced cases represent just over one-tenth of 1% of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” who DHS claims are registered to vote in California, which highlights how infrequently Trump’s DOJ has filed criminal charges against noncitizens for election-related crimes in the state. Put another way: The 28 individuals charged in California represent .0001% of the state’s 23 million registered voters.

An MS NOW review of the charging documents that have been made public also reveals that some of the election-related charges loudly touted by DOJ officials in press conferences and on social media appear to have been quietly dropped.

In another threatening letter to county election officials on Friday, the Justice Department continued to claim that it had charged “28 aliens for unlawful voting and registration offenses.” Federal court records show that in five of the California criminal complaints, the charge for “fraudulent voter registration” had been crossed out with a red line, with the initials of the corresponding Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent who brought the complaint.

Those five individuals now appear to be charged only with the crime of making a false statement under oath in a naturalization application, not with unlawfully registering to vote or voting, said Samantha Trepel, a former Justice Department prosecutor, who reviewed some of the charging documents.

After reading the charging documents filed by the HSI agents, Eric Balliet, who spent more than 20 years at that agency when he worked for ICE, told MS NOW that based on his experience the federal judge overseeing some of the cases likely struck down the election-related charges.

“Facts and transparency matter. If judges are not finding sufficient probable cause exists in nearly 1 in 5 of the voter fraud cases that are presented to them, then that is a problem,” said Balliet, who served at the Department of Homeland Security across multiple administrations, including during President Donald Trump’s first term. “That shows the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure remains intact.”

Balliet added that the dropped election-related charges at this stage show “a lack of familiarity of the elements of the crime that the agents are investigating,” adding that it is not the fault of the HSI agents, because “they were never trained or provided legal guidance on what is required to pursue these charges.”

The Justice Department could bring back the election-related charges in those cases at a later date. But asked why the voting-related charges were dropped in some of the cases, Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels did not provide a direct answer. “The 28 noncitizens were charged in criminal complaints with federal crimes,” Pels said. “The department is bringing more election fraud cases every week.”

Of the 28 publicly announced cases, eight are unavailable through a federal records search and unable to be verified as of publication.

The relatively minuscule number of criminal complaints announced in California represents a nationwide trend. An MS NOW review of court records found that between early September 2026 and mid-October, the Trump administration charged 105 people with illegally registering or voting as a noncitizen.

And that small number also directly contradicts Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The president has made frequent unfounded claims about noncitizen voting as pretext for claiming that the midterm elections have been rigged against Republicans, and as justification for possible federal interference, civil rights attorneys and former DOJ officials have warned.

Those experts also say the Justice Department, run by Trump’s former personal lawyer, is attempting to intimidate states into disenfranchising voters of color. Based on the records publicly available so far, the majority of the 28 charged in California were from counties with significant nonwhite populations.

“This administration has one goal only: suppress the votes of Black and Latino voters who they deem expendable,” Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and former assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, told MS NOW. “Historically, the Justice Department has focused on enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”

Noncitizen voting is extremely rare and has never swayed the outcome of an election, according to research from both partisan and nonpartisan organizations. Past convictions are also rare; a Heritage Foundation database found that nationwide between 2000 and 2025 there were 71 criminal convictions of noncitizens for unlawfully voting.

Asked if the DOJ was worried its actions could result in the disenfranchisement of American citizens — as some have already been incorrectly counted in the Trump administration’s lists of alleged noncitizens — Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, said “no.”

“Every action the department has taken to protect the integrity of this year’s elections is grounded in the law and being litigated in open court,” Pels said. “Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote and that every lawful ballot is counted.”

The Justice Department has made no secret that California is in its crosshairs, filing a new lawsuit alleging that the state has ignored the federal government’s urgent requests that it verify the citizenship of the 20,000 individuals, refuse to mail them ballots and segregate any that are returned.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held a rare Sunday afternoon hearing on the DOJ’s demand that California segregate ballots the administration claims are from alleged noncitizens. The judges on the federal appeals court appeared ready to reject the Justice Department’s effort. A federal judge in Santa Ana, California, has scheduled a hearing on the lawsuit for this week.

Pressed on the timing by MS NOW, the Justice Department did not directly answer why it waited for months to send California any list of suspected noncitizens to the state. The DOJ first alleged in July that California had more than 190,000 potential noncitizens on its voter rolls but did not send a list of individuals to the state until Oct. 13.

The 20,000 alleged noncitizens are the ones that “have been manually verified to date,” Pels, the Justice Department spokesperson claimed, adding “that number can and will go up.”

But the small number of charges brought to date in California and across the country compared with the more than 150 million Americans who voted in the last presidential election “shows that noncitizen voting is not a widespread problem,” said Trepel, who served as a Justice Department prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division across Republican and Democratic administrations.

“States already have multiple safeguards in place to ensure only eligible citizens can vote, and there continues to be no evidence that noncitizen voting poses a meaningful threat to election integrity,” Trepel said. “Efforts to exaggerate the issue risk undermining public confidence in our elections and could be used to justify removing eligible voters from the rolls.”

The Justice Department itself has repeatedly admitted that the new citizenship lists it is creating to verify a person’s voter eligibility are not perfect and could have errors. Earlier this year, a Justice Department attorney said “certainly a responsible state would not take” the government’s citizenship lists “and then immediately or automatically throw off every single person on their voter rolls who does not appear on that list,” according to a court transcript reviewed by MS NOW.

And during a press conference last week, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter made a similar admission, saying “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect.”

“These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens,” McCotter said.

The top federal prosecutor in California, Bill Essayli, described the department’s lawsuit against California as “an emergency and we expect the courts to treat it as such.”

Meanwhile, the White House continues to defend the noncitizen voter hunt. A White House spokesperson called it “decisive lawful action to protect our elections.”

David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who now advises Republican and Democratic election officials across the country, said the Trump administration was targeting California and spinning a false narrative about widespread noncitizen voter fraud because “they are failing at everything they try. This is desperation and it will fail.”

“This administration has spent 21 months using all of the resources of the federal government to try to manufacture evidence to support the president’s lies about widespread noncitizen voting,” Becker said. “In all that time they have charged only a few dozen. Every time their claims are subjected to scrutiny, they fall apart, revealing an infinitesimally small number of noncitizens accidentally on the lists.”

California officials, for their part, have questioned whether the data supplied by the DOJ is in fact verifiable or even usable. Claims of noncitizens on voter rolls in other states have quickly fallen apart, as in the case of Nevada, which found that every person the Trump administration accused of being a noncitizen on its voter rolls was in fact a citizen, according to email exchanges between Nevada officials and DHS officials provided to MS NOW.

In Los Angeles County, where the Justice Department claims more than 7,000 noncitizens are registered to vote, the election officials found that some of the people on the list have a listed birthplace in the United States, a strong indicator that they are citizens. In a sampling of the suspected noncitizen list, LA County County Registrar Dean Logan said, officials also found that some had no voting history and that others had canceled their voter registrations.

Still, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters on Thursday that the Justice Department had not ruled out pursuing legal action against other states before the election.

“There’s a number of states that we’re looking at,” Blanche said. He said that it was “never our intention to improperly interfere with elections” or a state certification process.

“But you know, to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that,” Blanche added, “of course I’m not going to say that.”

The post As the DOJ amps up threats against noncitizen voting in California, the number of cases brought there — and across the country — remains low appeared first on MS NOW.

The Justice Department sent threatening letters to California election officials on Friday demanding local registrars immediately sequester ballots from voters the Trump administration alleges are noncitizens.

The letters were hand-delivered to counties across the state in a move that some clerks viewed as an attempt to intimidate state election officials despite ongoing litigation.

In the letter to Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder Kristin Connelly, a copy of which was obtained by MS NOW, U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian warned Connelly that she will face prosecution if she fails to “segregate” ballots from the suspected noncitizens on the department’s list.

“It’s an unenforceable 48-hour deadline delivered late on a Friday,” Connelly told MS NOW. “There’s nothing about this that is actionable for me at this moment, because I need to follow the state and federal laws.”

The move by the Justice Department marks the latest escalation by the administration as President Donald Trump repeats false claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and data from nonpartisan organizations and state audits have shown that those isolated incidents have not changed the outcome of an election.

The Justice Department sent Connelly a list of 407 suspected noncitizens registered to vote in Contra Costa County. That number is a subset of the 20,000 alleged noncitizens the department sent to California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County last week.

“I write to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by- mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified,” DOJ attorney Missakian wrote to Connelly. The DOJ told Connelly to “temporarily set aside” but “not cancel” the mail ballots until “citizenship status can be determined.”

They gave Connelly and other clerks “48 hours” to work with the DOJ and DHS “to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not.” The counties must provide social security numbers, a copy of state IDs, a copy of voter registration applications for people on its list, the DOJ ordered in the letter.

“The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring federal crimes are significant,” the letter to Connelly and other clerks state.

Asked if she’d afraid of prosecution, Connelly said “no.”

“Because I’m not doing anything wrong. I protect our voter rolls, we’re very meticulous about it,” Connelly said. “We follow the law. Do I want a target on my back? No, I do not. Do I want to get prosecuted? No, I do not.”

The Justice Department directly contacted every county in California, DOJ spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, told MS NOW.

“We are asking each county election official to commit to working with us by providing the necessary information for DHS to quickly verify citizenship status,” Pels said. “With their help, we can ensure the most secure election in California history.”

The latest threats to election officials come after the Justice Department sent similar orders to LA County and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Oct. 13, after counties had already begun to mail ballots to voters across the state.

In a message to fellow California clerks and election officials Friday, LA County Registrar Dean Logan said the new letter from the DOJ “misrepresents the facts of their own actions” and “threatens local election officials twelve days before the election.”

“To have them threaten me with prosecution at this hour is not what’s helpful for democracy,” Connelly told MS NOW. “I want to make sure that the voters know that we have safe and secure elections.”

The escalation comes after the Justice Department sued California, asking a judge to block the state from counting roughly 20,000 ballots from people the administration claims are “likely noncitizens.” A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for next week, but the DOJ is asking an appeals court to make a decision this weekend.

In Los Angeles County, a preliminary sampling of the suspected noncitizen names sent by the Justice Department found that “approximately 43% had canceled voter registrations, and more than 70% had no voting history,” Logan said in a prior statement. And in a court filing, LA County said some 25.8 percent of the sampled voters listed a “place of birth in the United States, a strong indicator of citizenship status.”

Those findings fit a pattern. In Nevada, state officials reviewed suspected noncitizen lists provided by the Trump administration, only to find zero were noncitizens, according to email exchanges between state and federal officials obtained by MS NOW. And in other states, local officials have told MS NOW that the lists of alleged noncitizens are unreliable and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.

The post DOJ demands California counties separate alleged noncitizen ballots within 48 hours appeared first on MS NOW.