Boasberg Refuses to Punish Immigrant Group That Picked Apart DOJ’s Noncitizen Voter List
Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Election Day rejected a Justice Department request to punish an immigrant rights group that published an analysis attacking the Trump administration’s list of suspected noncitizen voters in California.
In a short minute order Tuesday, Boasberg denied the department’s motion to strike and show cause. “No violation of the Court’s Order occurred here,” he wrote, according to the docket entry.
The fight centers on a list of more than 20,000 people the administration says are noncitizens registered to vote in California. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, is suing over how the government is using it.
On Friday, Boasberg let CHIRLA see the federal data but barred it from disclosing any names. He said the group could use the list only to argue that it has legal standing to sue, the Associated Press reported.
On Saturday, CHIRLA’s lawyers filed an analysis saying more than 40% of the people on the list do not appear in California’s voter file. It also flagged 22 people as likely naturalized citizens and argued thousands more citizens were on the list.
DOJ Sought Contempt Referral
The Justice Department fired back Sunday. It said the analysis had nothing to do with standing and broke Boasberg’s order, and asked him to strike parts of the filing and refer the matter for a possible criminal contempt investigation.
“The report’s political grandstanding about alleged inaccuracies that purportedly impact California voters generally, or comparisons between the government’s list and the full ‘California voter file,’ has no relevance to whether the particular plaintiffs in this case have standing,” the department wrote.
In its motion, the department also sought civil sanctions up to dismissal of the case. It said the analysis “appears calculated to stir up media criticism” of the government.
Boasberg disagreed. He said his order contemplated public filings with personal information blacked out, and that CHIRLA “permissibly used the data from the lists to successfully make their standing arguments.”
To the extent the group’s experts “drew general conclusions about the list’s reliability,” Boasberg wrote, that analysis “was reasonably related to establishing the risks facing CHIRLA’s members and thus to its standing.”
The ruling follows a preliminary injunction issued Monday that blocks federal demands that California set aside ballots cast by people on the list, according to the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which represents CHIRLA.
The Supreme Court also refused Monday to order California to set aside the 20,000 ballots. In a separate case, a federal judge in San Francisco barred the department from pressing election offices to purge or separate suspected noncitizen voters.
The administration says its list was carefully built from California’s own voter registration data and checked against federal citizenship records. California officials say the list is full of errors.
Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal court in Washington, has clashed repeatedly with the Trump administration. Last week he ordered the Justice Department to name the states it had pressed over noncitizen voters.
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