In a possible blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to charge noncitizens with voting in U.S. elections, a judge has dismissed a federal case against a Jamaican national accused of illegally voting, finding the law she was charged under is unconstitutional.
Miami-based U.S. District Judge David S. Leibowitz ruled Thursday in a 31-page order that the criminal case against Chelsea Cox, who was charged in October 2025 with a misdemeanor for illegally voting in 2020, must be dismissed. He said a decades-old federal law that prohibits a non-U.S. citizen from voting in a federal election, 18 U.S.C. § 611, is unconstitutional.
Under the U.S. Constitution, Leibowitz wrote, only states can set voter qualifications, not Congress. The judge said state prosecutors in Florida could prosecute Cox under state law for unlawfully voting, not the federal government.
The decision applies only to Cox and appears to be the first time a court has deemed the statute unconstitutional. But it could dent the Justice Department’s push to pursue noncitizen voting, a practice that most elections experts say is rare but that President Trump has long alleged — without evidence — is common.
Shortly after Leibowitz’s decision, the Justice Department moved to appeal the ruling. A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision involved a federal law that makes it a misdemeanor for noncitizens to vote. It does not cover a separate law barring people from making false claims of citizenship in order to vote, another tool used by the Justice Department in recent months.
“This is an unusual criminal case. It rests upon a forty-year-old federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 611, that prohibits the act of voting in a federal election by a non-U.S. citizen. Until very recently, no federal court has been presented with the following question about that statute: Did Congress have Constitutional authority to enact it? That’s unusual, all by itself,” Leibowitz wrote.
The Biden-appointed judge went on to say the Justice Department’s “principal defense of the statute’s constitutionality invokes a single Supreme Court case that is very, very weak.”
“So why does the Government lead with such a weak hand? Because it’s the best hand it can play,” he said. “And why is that? Because the text, structure, and original public meaning of the Constitution show that Congress does not have the constitutional power to enact this statute.”
In a phone conversation Friday night, Cox’s attorney Bruce Udolf said his client is “gratified” by Leibowitz’s ruling and said it was a “huge relief to her.” Udolf said Cox recently underwent a medical procedure, and he is working with the government to determine the next steps in the case and whether the Trump administration moves to deport her.
In court papers, federal prosecutors accused Cox of overstaying a U.S. tourist visa more than 20 years ago and obtaining a Florida driver’s license by presenting a fraudulent U.S. Virgin Islands birth certificate. They alleged she cast ballots in several federal elections starting in 2012, with a vote in the 2020 general election leading to last year’s charges.
Cox’s lawyers asked the court to dismiss the charges earlier this year, arguing the law used to charge her “exceeds Congress’s authority and intrudes on a power reserved to the States.”
Federal prosecutors pushed back, arguing the Constitution “provides that the federal government play a significant role in overseeing such elections.”
“Whether it is to regulate the manner of federal elections or to preserve a distinct privilege of federal citizenship, surely the United States has the right to exclude non-citizens from voting in federal elections,” attorneys for the Justice Department wrote.
To help him resolve the issue, Leibowitz asked a conservative legal heavyweight to offer his analysis: Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration and is one of the country’s best-known Supreme Court litigators.
In an amicus brief filed over the summer, Clement found that Congress likely “overstepped constitutional bounds in enacting §611.” He noted that, while no state currently allows noncitizens to vote in federal elections, there is some history of states allowing the practice.
Clement wrote that “states, not the federal government, determine voter qualifications.”
More from CBS News
Go deeper with The Free Press