The Department of Justice on Friday warned local election officials in California to cooperate with the administration to identify noncitizens on a list of registered voters or face potential legal action, according to a letter obtained by NBC News.<\/p>\n
The department sent letters to 57 of California\u2019s 58 counties in a move that signals an escalation in the Trump administration\u2019s effort to prevent the state from counting ballots from voters the federal government identifies as likely noncitizens. <\/p>\n
Los Angeles County received a similar letter<\/a> last week.<\/p>\n NBC News obtained the letter sent to San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Joani Finwall from the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Los Angeles. In it, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bilal Essayli notes that his office is providing a list of 1,133 names of \u201clikely aliens.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWithin 48 hours, we ask that you commit to working with DOJ and DHS to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not,\u201d Essayli wrote. \u201cI write to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by-mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified.\u201d<\/p>\n For those whose citizenship status cannot be confirmed, Essayli asked the county to \u201cimmediately instruct the appropriate elections official to segregate \u2014 not cancel \u2014 those individuals\u2019 vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring federal crimes are significant. An alien voting in a federal election is a federal crime \u2014 and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful,\u201d Essayli wrote in the letter.<\/p>\n \u201cThe letters speak for themselves,\u201d Essayli said in a statement to NBC News. \u201cAny election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy.\u201d<\/p>\n The New York Times was the first to report t<\/a>he letters.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump\u2019s DOJ has not provided any evidence for their claims of massive voter fraud,\u201d Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said in a statement late Friday. \u201cThey\u2019ve admitted that the data they point to is inaccurate and unreliable. No matter how many lawsuits they file or how many election officials they threaten, they do not have the authority to interfere.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump administration has made the pursuit of noncitizen voters a priority<\/a> in the run-up to the midterms and has singled out heavily Democratic California. The administration has sued to block the state from counting more than 20,000 mail-in ballots from voters it suspects are not U.S. citizens. On Thursday, it asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals<\/a> to impose the restrictions before the lower court has ruled in the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Department of Justice on Friday warned local election officials in California to cooperate with the administration to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-506241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}