Judge blocks Justice Department threats against election officials

US District Judge Trina Thompson ordered the Justice Department on Friday to stop threatening state and local election officials with prosecution for refusing its demands on ballots cast by voters it alleges are non-citizens, three days before the midterm elections.

Why it matters: The temporary restraining order, which runs to November 16, removes the threat of criminal charges hanging over the officials who will process and count the November 3 vote, and it is the second federal ruling this week against the department's pre-election interventions.

Data as of Ruling October 30, 2026, Northern District of California; election November 3, 2026. Reuters report of October 30, 2026 and The Hill report of October 31, 2026, both from the feed pool and read via search results in this run (direct fetches of both outlets were blocked by policy and not retried). The restraining order's text is quoted in the Reuters report; the order itself was not read directly.

A federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration on Friday to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with its demands over voting by alleged non-citizens. US District Judge Trina Thompson issued the temporary restraining order in a lawsuit brought by election workers’ unions and civil rights groups, including the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the NAACP, against the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

The order bars the administration from demanding that officials remove voters from statewide rolls, refuse ballots to specific voters, or segregate ballots cast in the midterms on the basis of a federal list of alleged non-citizen voters, and from threatening officials or workers with criminal prosecution for failing to comply. Thompson, appointed by former President Joe Biden, wrote that the public has a paramount interest in election officials being able to carry out their work in accordance with federal law, and that with election day only days away the balance of equities favoured the plaintiffs, who she found likely to succeed on the merits. She described the threats as contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious. The order expires on November 16.

The ruling follows the department’s letters this month to election officials in every California county, and this week to officials in all 50 states, pressing them to identify potential non-citizens on their rolls and to preserve election records. On Wednesday a separate federal judge rejected the department’s effort to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 California voters it said might not be citizens, calling the move pre-election interference. The Justice Department had no immediate comment on Friday’s ruling.

The order lands inside a wider pattern this cycle: federal probes and suits touching Alaska, Arizona, California and Texas in the final week, each contested by the officials who run the vote. What Thompson’s ruling changes is the personal exposure of those officials. Counting can still be litigated after November 3, but the people counting can no longer be told, in the days before the vote, that processing ballots as their own law directs could make them defendants.

Judge blocks Justice Department threats against election officials

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