A 9th Circuit panel rejected the Trump Justice Department’s emergency bid to segregate about 20,000 California mail ballots tied to alleged non-citizens.
The two-to-one ruling came Monday, after a rare Sunday emergency hearing, and held that the appeals court lacks jurisdiction at this stage. The judges sent the dispute back to district court, where a hearing was set for Tuesday afternoon, with California’s midterm election only days away.
ABC News reported that the Justice Department wanted an immediate order walling off roughly 20,000 mail-in ballots linked to people the Trump administration says are likely non-citizens. Federal law already bars illegal immigrants from voting. The administration’s case is that California failed to act on the list and that delay undercuts federal enforcement.
Circuit Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez formed the majority. Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay dissented. Bennett, a Trump appointee, pressed the jurisdictional problem in open court.
Bennett told DOJ attorney Matthew Donnelly:
"I don't see how we have jurisdiction,"
In the written majority ruling, Bennett and Sanchez went further. They said the United States built much of its own time crunch.
"The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one. At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief."
That framing matters. The DOJ filed its lawsuit against California earlier this month. By the time the emergency appeal landed, the state was already moving a huge volume of mail ballots. Donnelly told the panel California had disclosed that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were already being processed ahead of the election.
Bennett also questioned the legal theory underneath the case. He asked how a federal criminal statute could override the state’s power to set the manner of elections under the Constitution’s Elections Clause, especially when both Congress and the California Legislature have already made non-citizen voting illegal.
"How can the legislature making laws with regard to the manner of holding elections be preempted by a criminal statute passed by the Congress, especially when both the Congress and the California Legislature have made it illegal for non-citizens to vote?"
Central to the dispute is the roughly 20,000-person list itself. The Trump administration says those names are likely non-citizens who were sent mail-in ballots for next week’s midterm. California’s resistance, in the DOJ’s telling, leaves federal officials unable to police a basic rule: only citizens vote.
Los Angeles officials pushed back in court papers filed earlier last week. They described a preliminary review of 200 names from that list.
"indicate that they were born in the United States, which is strong evidence of citizenship; and 71.2% of the records have no voting history,"
Nearly 40% of that small sample, the officials said, showed a U.S. birthplace. They also described a “high percentage” of people who say they were born in the United States, plus many more with no voting history at all. The filing does not settle the full 20,000-name list. It does show how hard the state is contesting the administration’s claims while ballots are already moving.
Sanchez is a Biden appointee. Bennett and Bumatay were appointed by Trump. The split was not a simple party-line brush-off; it was a jurisdictional stop sign at the appellate door. Bumatay would have taken a different path. The majority would not.
So the case returns to district court on a compressed clock. California runs a vast mail-ballot system. The DOJ says a five-figure block of ballots is tainted by likely non-citizenship and must be segregated before they are counted. State officials and local filings cast doubt on the list’s quality. The appeals court refused to referee that fight on an emergency basis.
Lawful elections require a clean roll and a firm ban on ballots from illegal immigrants. Courts that slow-walk that question in the final stretch leave voters to live with the risk.
