Civil rights groups sue DHS and USCIS, saying voter-eligibility reviews single out naturalized citizens

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman recused herself Thursday, Oct. 29, from a lawsuit challenging what the plaintiffs describe as a Department of Homeland Security program to review naturalized citizens' voting records, a day after it was filed in the Northern District of California. Her one-page order asks that the case be reassigned and vacates all pending dates.¹ The CourtListener copy of the docket later logged a reassignment entry and now lists the case as No. 3:26-cv-12617, not the 5:26-cv-12617 on the recusal order, but does not name the new judge. As of Thursday afternoon it showed no motion for emergency relief.¹²

The case is OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates v. United States Department of Homeland Security. The plaintiffs are OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, its OCA-San Mateo and OCA-Sacramento chapters, and Common Cause. Their lawyers are from the American Civil Liberties Union and its California affiliates and two Asian Americans Advancing Justice groups. The defendants are DHS, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow, the officials sued in their official capacities.³

What the plaintiffs allege

According to the complaint, USCIS adopted the program in August 2026 and assigned hundreds of agents to review people on a DHS-generated list of suspected noncitizen voters. The plaintiffs say everyone on the list has an Alien Number, which U.S.-born citizens are not assigned, so only naturalized and derivative citizens can be reviewed. Relying largely on a whistleblower account that two U.S. senators sent to Mullin and Edlow on Sept. 13, the complaint says agents were told to search state voter-lookup websites using people's personal data, faced a quota of at least 40 reviews a day, and were directed to create records in the TECS law enforcement system for people they suspected of voting unlawfully.³

The plaintiffs also say the federal government has used the program's output to press states, citing a U.S. lawsuit seeking to stop California from counting mail ballots from 20,000 voters the government lists as likely noncitizens and an Oct. 26 letter asking Washington to set aside ballots from 405 voters.³

The complaint brings five claims. Two rest on the Civil Rights Act's provision requiring uniform voter-qualification standards, one on the Privacy Act's record-accuracy requirement, and two on the Administrative Procedure Act alone, calling the program arbitrary and capricious and a departure from the agencies' own privacy rules. It asks the court to declare the program unlawful and vacate it, bar further investigations and ballot demands based on the DHS list, and order records created under it expunged.³

“The administration can't keep creating political stunts to sow distrust in our elections,” Theresa J. Lee, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, said in a statement.⁴

The government's position

No response from the defendants appeared on the docket as of Thursday; summonses were issued that day.² DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported Wednesday.⁵

A separate case

The suit is separate from California Nurses Association v. Mullin, in which another judge in the same court on Oct. 21 preliminarily blocked DHS agents' election-related home visits to voters in California and eight other states under the Voting Rights Act's intimidation ban. The new complaint says that ruling did not assess the USCIS review program and lasts only until polls close Nov. 3.³

What the records do not show

• Who the new judge is; the CourtListener docket shows a Thursday reassignment entry without the name, and entries 14 and 15 are not posted there. Whether the plaintiffs will seek emergency relief before Nov. 3 is also not shown.²
• How many people are on the DHS list or how many TECS records exist; the complaint's account rests largely on a whistleblower disclosure SignalData did not independently review.³
• Any written response from DHS, USCIS or the Justice Department.⁵