A woman in her car drops off her ballot at the ballot drop box in front of the Sacramento County Voter Registration and Elections building in Sacramento on Tuesday, June 2, 2026.
LIBBY SIMPSON
libby.simpson@sacbee.com
A federal appeals court late Monday refused to consider an emergency request by the Trump administration to force California to set aside the ballots of 20,000 people who may not be U.S. citizens without first allowing a federal judge in Los Angeles to hold an already-scheduled hearing on Tuesday.
The case is one of several fast-moving civil and criminal proceedings involving a list developed by the administration naming names of individuals it says have a high likelihood of being noncitizens who are registered to vote.
It grows out of a lawsuit filed against California by the U.S. Department of Justice on Oct. 15, accusing the state of failing to cooperate and demanding that ballots cast by individuals on the list be set aside until their citizenship status is confirmed.
In Monday’s 91-page ruling, filed after a highly unusual weekend hearing, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s argument that it did not have time to wait for proceedings planned for the matter on Tuesday before U.S. District Judge David Carter.
In it, Circuit Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, said the government could have sought assistance from the state and the courts long before it did, and questioned the need for an emergency appeal when Carter had not yet ruled.
“The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one,” Bennett wrote. “At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit.”
The government’s list has already been called “flawed” by a federal judge, who in a separate case barred the Department of Homeland Security from sending armed agents to people’s homes to ask them about their voter registration until after Election Day next week.
In Nevada, none of the people listed in a similar database were found to be noncitizens.
The ruling was welcomed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the list and accompanying lawsuit a “despicable” attack on democracy.
“Today’s ruling is a positive development and a welcome speed bump to Trump’s disgusting attacks on the Constitution and our country’s democracy,” Newsom said in a news release. “Trump is illegally trying to seize powers in the Constitution entrusted to others so he can stay in power. This lawsuit is just the latest step.”
In its hearing on Sunday, Bennett and Circuit Judge Gabriel Sanchez, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, expressed deep skepticism of the government’s arguments, from the timing and need for emergency action to the quality of its list.
Bennett also pressed the administration’s lawyer, Matthew Donnelly, on whether the federal government had the right to demand such actions from the state at all. Holding up a piece of paper on which he said words from the Constitution were written, he read aloud the Elections Clause, which gives states the authority to set the time, place and manner of elections.
“I don’t see how we have jurisdiction,” Bennett said.
Just because the federal government disagrees with the state’s policy, that doesn’t mean it has the right to use the courts to force change, he said.
“The United States executive is unhappy with what they’re doing, and doesn’t like the manner in which they have determined they are going to conduct the election,” Bennett said at the hearing. “But it seems to me that under the Elections Clause, they have the right to determine the manner of the elections, including sorting out noncitizens.”
Bennett and Sanchez, who comprised the majority, wrote separate concurring opinions, while Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented.
“The federal government has a sovereign interest in safeguarding federal elections and ensuring that the votes of noncitizens do not undermine our electoral results,” Bumatay wrote.
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Sharon Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Sacramento Bee. She has reported and edited for news organizations across California, including the Los Angeles Times, Reuters and Cityside Journalism Initiative. She grew up in Dallas and earned her master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. She has served on teams that have won three Pulitzer prizes.