Federal prosecutors gave nearly every county in California just 48 hours to pull aside ballots tied to an unverified government list of suspected noncitizens, with a midterm election already underway.
Federal prosecutors working for Donald Trump’s Justice Department sent letters to county election offices across California on Friday, demanding that registrars set aside and verify ballots the administration claims may belong to noncitizens and warning that officials who process those ballots could face criminal charges. The counties were given 48 hours to comply.
The letters went out to 57 of California’s 58 counties in a dramatic expansion of a pressure campaign that had previously targeted only Los Angeles County and the state. Bill Essayli, the prosecutor who signed them, wrote that counties must “commit to working with DOJ and DHS” to determine which voters on an accompanying federal list are citizens, and he told the Associated Press that any official who knowingly processes a noncitizen’s ballot is “opening themselves to legal jeopardy.”
Essayli runs the Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office without Senate confirmation. A federal judge ruled his acting appointment unlawful in October 2025 but allowed him to keep leading the office under the title of first assistant U.S. attorney, an arrangement defense lawyers are still challenging in court.
A 48 Hour Ultimatum Delivered Late On A Friday
The letters were hand delivered across the state on Friday, a move some county clerks described as an attempt to intimidate election officials in the middle of active litigation. “It’s an unenforceable 48-hour deadline delivered late on a Friday,” Contra Costa County’s registrar of voters, Kristin Connelly, told MS NOW.
In Northern California, the Justice Department’s top prosecutor there, Craig Missakian, told the registrars in Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties to review lists covering more than 1,300 voters combined and to sequester any ballot where citizenship could not be confirmed. The letter sent to San Bernardino County included 1,133 names in that county alone.
The demands go beyond the ballots themselves. The department is ordering counties to hand over Social Security numbers, copies of identification, and voter registration applications for every person on its list.
The Lawsuit Behind The Letters
The Justice Department sued California and Los Angeles County on October 15, seeking to block officials from counting ballots returned by more than 20,000 people the Department of Homeland Security flagged as “likely” noncitizens by matching the state’s voter rolls against federal immigration records. A hearing before U.S. District Judge David Carter is scheduled for Tuesday, but the administration decided not to wait; on Friday it filed an emergency request with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and demanded a ruling by Saturday. The appeals court responded late Friday by ordering California to answer the motion by noon Saturday.
The lawsuit followed an earlier ultimatum from Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, who on October 13 sent state and county officials a password protected thumb drive containing the names and gave them 48 hours to act on it. Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan refused, saying in a statement reported by CNN that “Maintaining accurate voter registration records is a fundamental responsibility of our office” and that eligibility decisions must rest on verifiable information rather than unconfirmed data matching.
Earlier this week, federal authorities charged 28 people from the list of 20,000 with illegally registering to vote; some were also charged with voting illegally and lying on naturalization paperwork.
California Says The Federal List Cannot Be Trusted
State officials have rejected the demands across the board. In court filings, California’s lawyers argue that the federal data is unreliable, that counties lack both the authority and the federal records needed to verify citizenship, and that acting on the list risks disenfranchising eligible citizens while delaying certification of the November results.
There is also a practical problem the administration’s deadline ignores. Once a mail ballot’s signature is verified, the ballot is separated from its identifying envelope and mixed in with the rest, which means many of the ballots the DOJ wants pulled back no longer exist as traceable items. State filings say hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been counted.
The track record behind these federal lists gives California every reason for skepticism. When Homeland Security claimed 15,903 noncitizens were registered in Nevada earlier this year, the state reviewed every name and found zero. Decades of research show voting by noncitizens is vanishingly rare, difficult to prove, and has never been shown to change the outcome of a race.
What Happens Next
As of Saturday afternoon, no court has ordered California to set aside a single ballot, and counties are continuing to process the ballots voters return. The Ninth Circuit could act before Tuesday’s hearing, or it could leave the dispute with Judge Carter.
Voting is already well underway. Under California law, all of the state’s more than 23 million registered voters receive a ballot in the mail, and ballots began going out weeks before the administration filed suit. The midterm election is November 3.
