Judge limits election-related immigration stops amid broader legal war ahead of midterms

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Set us as preferred A sweeping campaign by federal immigration agents to identify voter fraud by noncitizens through door knocks, street stops and other field interviews in California and eight other states must be reined in ahead of the Nov.3 election, after a federal judge in Northern California ruled it has intimidated U.S.

citizens and interfered with the work of voting rights groups.Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin said in a ruling Wednesday that limiting the Department of Homeland Security’s surging operations in those states — which she wrote “sweep in U.S.citizens for investigation” — does not prevent the Trump administration from “exercising their authority to investigate voter fraud by lawful means.”A Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency is “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote,” and has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S.

citizens.”The ruling was the latest to come out of an unprecedented legal war playing out between the Trump administration and California in recent days, in which an array of election cases are working their way through the federal courts at breakneck speed.There is, for example, the lawsuit the U.S.Justice Department filed against California and state and local elections officials last week, demanding that they set aside any ballots from a list of 20,000 individuals identified by immigration officials as “likely noncitizens.” Politics The lawsuit accuses Trump and his administration of using “shoddily compiled lists of supposed noncitizens” and “coercive threats” against state officials to assert federal control over the midterms.There are also two cases out of Washington, D.C., in which a coalition of Democratic leaders, immigrant rights groups, voting rights experts and naturalized citize...