Latest / GNN Daily Breaking News / Judge tells Trump to stop demands on California noncitizen voters
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: A federal judge has issued a formal court order directing
- 0:03Speaker 1: the Department of Justice to immediately halt its attempts to
- 0:06Speaker 1: threaten and intimidate California state and local election officials regarding
- 0:11Speaker 1: a disputed list of alleged non-citizen voters. The injunction, handed
- 0:16Speaker 1: down in federal district court. blocks federal prosecutors from issuing
- 0:21Speaker 1: grand jury subpoenas or pursuing emergency enforcement demands against county
- 0:26Speaker 1: registrars who refuse to process federal voter purge directives in
- 0:30Speaker 1: the final hours before the 2026 midterm elections. In a
- 0:35Speaker 1: sharp rebuke of the administration's legal strategy, the court ruled
- 0:39Speaker 1: that the Department of Justice's aggressive pre-election demands violate longstanding
- 0:45Speaker 1: constitutional principles of federalism. which delegate primary authority over election
- 0:50Speaker 1: administration and ballot qualification to individual states. The federal judge
- 0:56Speaker 1: noted that forcing county officials to act on external, unverified
- 1:01Speaker 1: data on the eve of balloting creates severe risks of
- 1:04Speaker 1: voter disenfranchisement and unlawfully interrupts state-mandated voter registration verification timelines
- 1:10Speaker 1: established under the National Voter Registration Act. The ruling arrives
- 1:15Speaker 1: alongside a separate judicial decision ordering the Justice Department to
- 1:19Speaker 1: disclose its full list of roughly 20,000 flagged individuals to
- 1:23Speaker 1: voting rights groups and legal teams, including the UCLA Voting
- 1:28Speaker 1: Rights Project. Initial data analyses of the department's list revealed
- 1:32Speaker 1: widespread errors, with state officials and voting rights organizations discovering
- 1:37Speaker 1: that dozens of individuals marked for potential purging were born
- 1:41Speaker 1: in the United States or are verified naturalized citizens. State
- 1:46Speaker 1: leaders hailed the court's order as a crucial protective barrier
- 1:49Speaker 1: for local election workers who have faced mounting federal legal
- 1:53Speaker 1: threats over ballot processing protocols. While the Department of Justice
- 1:57Speaker 1: has signaled its intent to appeal the ruling to the U.S.
- 2:00Speaker 1: Supreme Court, federal courts across multiple jurisdictions have consistently rejected
- 2:06Speaker 1: pre-election attempts to alter ballot handling. The legal victory reinforces
- 2:11Speaker 1: California's operational autonomy as tabulation centers prepare to process millions
- 2:16Speaker 1: of ballots on Election Day.