Immigrant rights group seeks to block use of federal databases it says could purge legal voters

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An immigrant rights group sued the Trump administration Wednesday to block the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from using federal databases that it alleged are being used to target naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, alleges that DHS and the U.S. Justice Department are interfering with fair elections by using inaccurate federal databases in an attempt to buttress allegations of voter fraud.

The federal government is engaging in an “attack on the freedom to vote,” Angelica Salas, the coalition’s executive director, said at a downtown Los Angeles news conference. “This is voter intimidation.”

The lawsuit — filed on behalf of the coalition by the UCLA Voting Rights Project — becomes part of a swirl of legal moves that states, including California, have taken to fend off federal actions that threaten to create confusion during the midterms.

“It’s not an accident the federal government is trying to interfere with the right to vote. … They believe they can intimidate naturalized U.S. citizens,” said Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California governor who is acting as a senior adviser to the voting project.

Part of a broader effort to search for noncitizens on voter rolls

The lawsuit alleges that the administration might be comparing voter rolls with undisclosed government databases. Those systems can include outdated information and be riddled with errors, it said, and could produce inaccurate results that disproportionately affect naturalized voters.

“Comparing government databases to try and arrive at a list of noncitizen registrants has been shown to result in erroneous data,” the lawsuit said. “Congress has never authorized such activities and in fact has … prohibited invasion of voter privacy through government data matches in this way.”

The Trump administration has been targeting noncitizen voting to allege it could be a source of significant fraud during the midterm elections, even though actual voting by people who are not citizens is rare. He is pushing for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters verified as U.S. citizens, and his Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.

Asked to respond to the lawsuit, a DHS spokesperson said in an email: “The department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known illegal aliens in our systems. It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

“DHS is laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” the statement added.

Judge had previously halted use of a federal citizenship database

In June, a federal judge ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool can no longer be used, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

The lawsuit said it isn’t clear if the administration used that system to generate projections about noncitizens on voting rolls in the states or if other unknown datasets were involved.

By May, the Trump administration had run millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility, a process that critics feared could purge valid voters from the rolls before the November elections. At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled states, have gone through a beefed-up verification program, or SAVE, at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of those have been flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died.

State officials push back against DHS noncitizen claims

Specifically, the lawsuit by the immigrant rights group asks the court to stop the administration from pursuing a review of California’s voter list and to rescind the letter sent to the state requesting voter information. It also asks the court to declare the administration’s actions unconstitutional.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is claiming without providing evidence that 250,000 noncitizens might be on the rolls in just four states, including 190,832 in California.

California’s secretary of state, Democrat Shirley Weber, said in response, “I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official.”

According to the lawsuit, federal officials have not disclosed evidence supporting those figures.