The Trump administration has threatened legal action against California election officials if they do not review a list of purported non-citizens on Los Angeles voter rolls within 48 hours, according to a Tuesday letter from the Justice Department obtained by CNN.
The letter, signed by the Justice Department’s number two, is an escalation in the DOJ’s attempts to push for aggressive voter purges with ballots already mailed in some states, after courts repeatedly rebuffed the administration’s attempts to insert itself into the election process. It’s the latest step in a government-wide campaign to uncover voter fraud, amid President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that cheating is widespread in elections.
The Justice Department requires election officials to refuse to mail ballots to presumed non-citizen voters and requires election officials to separate ballots from listed voters until their citizenship is confirmed.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote in the letter that if Los Angeles County election officials did not take steps to identify suspected non-citizen voters, the DOJ “would have no choice but to request emergency assistance.”
McCotter wrote that the department provided a password-protected USB drive containing names that the administration said “are likely non-citizens” who received an absentee ballot this year. It requests that election officials work with the Department of Homeland Security to comply with its requirements.
The letter was first reported by Reuters.
Spokespeople for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan did not immediately respond to CNN’s inquiries about the administration’s latest demands.
It’s unclear what legal avenue the administration could use to force California election officials to take the actions it wants. The Constitution gives the states the primary task of organizing elections, although it also authorizes Congress to adopt certain rules relating to voting.
Earlier this summer, the Justice Department sent letters warning that it would sue election officials who failed to take adequate steps to remove noncitizens from voter registration files, but officials in both parties dismissed the threat.
It’s unclear why the Justice Department sent the letter now, as election officials consider the window to change protocols to be closed.
“California’s voter rolls are public, and this administration has had 21 months, under full control of the federal government, to review those public rolls,” said David Becker, a former attorney in the DOJ’s elections section who now advises election administrators.
“California mailed mail-in ballots to all voters on October 5. One has to wonder why the DOJ would violate its own election investigation rules as Election Day approaches, and more than a week after knowing the state had already mailed the ballots, especially when their past claims were full of errors,” Becker said.
The Justice Department defended sending the letters.
“Federal law is clear: Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. The Department will take all legal steps necessary to protect the integrity of elections and ensure compliance with federal law,” DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels said.
The Trump administration has claimed that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote. In August, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that DHS had identified 250,000 noncitizen registered voters in four states — including California, as well as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada — by comparing public voter rolls with federal immigration records.
But these claims have come under scrutiny and, in some cases, have not held up. In Nevada, for example, DHS admitted to state officials that its initial reporting of 15,900 registered noncitizens was an unverified preliminary finding, and that it had only “confirmed” 185 of them through manual review. Last month, Nevada officials told DHS that their own subsequent review found all 185 to be citizens — a finding disputed by DHS.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division also sought unredacted data from state voter rolls as part of its search for noncitizens on the rolls. The department has sued 30 states to demand the data — but has lost every case a judge has ruled in so far, including in California.
Other attempts by the administration to control how states manage elections have also been rejected by the courts. The Supreme Court blocked a Trump directive directing the U.S. Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots, and a 2025 executive order from the president to strengthen proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration was also held up in court.
Trump’s efforts to implement these requirements through legislation failed in Congress this year. A judge’s recent ruling dismissing a lawsuit against non-citizen voters brought by the Florida administration also raised constitutional questions about federal law barring non-citizen voting.
The administration scored a major legal victory when the Supreme Court approved a federal immigration data system that Trump encouraged states to use to check the citizenship status of their registered voters. Election officials in more than half the states use the system voluntarily. However, even Republican election officials have balked at Justice Department proposals that would require them to purge voters the administration has deemed ineligible — particularly given accuracy concerns with the federal government’s data tools.
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