A federal appeals court keeps the block on Homeland Security's door to door voter fraud surge in nine states

The second federal court fight over election enforcement ended the same way as the first one this week. On Friday, a three judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration's emergency motion to lift an injunction against the Department of Homeland Security's Unlawful Voter Initiative, the programme under which agents in nine states questioned people at their homes about alleged illegal voting by noncitizens.

The injunction, issued last week by a district judge in California, stays in force until polls close on Election Day. It covers California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. In those states Homeland Security may not send agents after people it knows or suspects are citizens, or target homes where it knows or suspects a citizen lives, under the initiative.

The panel's reasoning was practical as much as legal. The government failed to show it would suffer irreparable harm from a pause that lasts only until Tuesday, the judges wrote, and the timing cut against it. The administration had more than a year and a half to investigate past voter fraud and chose to escalate just as early voting began, a delay that made it impossible to prosecute anyone identified before Election Day in any case. At Thursday's hearing, Judge Sidney Thomas pressed the government's lawyer on exactly that point. You cannot prosecute anybody in four days. You cannot convict them in four days. Why do you need this, he asked. Judge Kim Wardlaw asked whether the surge had an aspect that seemed intended to instil fear. The panel also recorded that Homeland Security had conceded it relied on faulty data to build its target lists, data that mislabelled citizens as noncitizens, and that officials acknowledged targeting naturalized citizens.

The plaintiffs, who include the California Nurses Association and the Voto Latino Foundation, argue the visits intimidate lawful voters. The administration argues that noncitizen voting is a real offence, that federal law bars it, and that the injunction itself is improper on any timeframe. This week alone, federal prosecutors charged four noncitizens in Nevada with voting illegally, and a district judge in the California ballot case rejected a separate Justice Department bid to set aside 20,000 mail ballots. The legal fight is not over. Moments after Friday's order, an unnamed circuit judge asked for a vote on rehearing the case before the full 9th Circuit, and the administration can still ask the Supreme Court to intervene before Tuesday.