California must answer by noon Saturday a DOJ emergency request to sequester ballots tied to about 20,000 suspected noncitizens, the Ninth Circuit ruled.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit late Friday ordered the state to respond to the Trump administration’s emergency filing, which seeks to keep mail ballots linked to roughly 20,000 suspected noncitizens from being processed with everyone else’s votes while eligibility is reviewed.
Fox News Digital reported that the Justice Department went to the appeals court after U.S. District Judge David Carter did not rule by a deadline the department had already requested. The DOJ wants a ruling by Saturday. A hearing before Judge Carter is still set for Tuesday, and it remains unclear whether the Ninth Circuit will act before that date.
Attorney General Todd Blanche and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli submitted the emergency papers. Their filing left little doubt about the stakes they see.
"This is an emergency,"
the filing states. It continues:
"Every minute of processing that occurs without segregating the ballots of suspected non-eligible voters causes untraceable disenfranchisement and dilution of the votes of United States citizens,"
That is the core of the federal case: once a questionable ballot is mixed into the count, the damage to lawful votes cannot be traced or undone.
Essayli’s office first sued California on Oct. 15. That filing came roughly two weeks after the state began mailing ballots. The lawsuit seeks a court order to stop ballots returned by the listed individuals from being counted.
In a Wednesday interview, Essayli framed the ask as narrow and practical.
"We're not asking California to take any drastic steps other than to sequester the ballots from the suspected noncitizens,"
He put a hard floor under the numbers.
"We believe it's at a minimum of 20,000. That's the floor."
Essayli said federal investigators have evidence those individuals received mail-in ballots in October. He has accused California of weak citizenship checks that let noncitizens onto the rolls. He also clashed with Gov. Gavin Newsom on social media this week over the fight.
Newsom has defended the integrity of California’s elections and said the state is following the law. The governor has not, in the available record, answered the specific demand to pull the listed ballots out of the processing line.
State and county election officials rejected the DOJ’s demands in court papers. They argue county offices lack authority and lack access to the federal records needed to verify citizenship status.
They also describe a process that works against late segregation. Once a mail-in ballot’s signature is verified, officials separate the ballot from its identifying envelope and run it with the rest of the ballots. At that point, matching a ballot back to a name on the DOJ list becomes a different problem.
Court records cited in the coverage show how far processing has already moved. Officials have already handled 331,000 ballots in Los Angeles County alone. California’s filings say separating ballots tied to the federal list would be impossible in cases where those ballots have already gone through that pipeline.
The Justice Department’s answer is urgency, not gradualism. The emergency request asks officials to set aside the listed ballots now, while eligibility is reviewed, rather than let them ride along with lawful votes.
The district posture set up the appeals scramble. The DOJ had asked Judge Carter for a ruling by a set deadline. When that ruling did not come, Blanche and Essayli took the emergency request to the Ninth Circuit the same day and sought action by Saturday.
The Ninth Circuit’s late-Friday order does not decide the merits. It forces California to answer by noon Saturday. That keeps the clock running on a dispute the department says grows more irreversible with every batch of ballots that clears signature check and loses its envelope.
Essayli has described the 20,000 figure as a minimum. The federal position is that suspected noncitizen ballots should not be blended into the count first and litigated later. California’s position is that the state lacks the tools the DOJ wants used, and that many ballots may already be past the point of clean separation.
Those two claims cannot both fully hold. Either election offices can still isolate the listed ballots, or large volumes of mail voting have already made the DOJ’s remedy harder by the hour. The court filings put that collision on paper. The 331,000 processed ballots in Los Angeles County alone show why the department called the situation an emergency instead of a routine discovery fight.
The DOJ’s own words center the harm on lawful voters. Untraceable dilution is not a technical footnote. It is the claim that illegal or ineligible ballots, once mixed in, cheapen every valid vote without a clean way to reverse the damage.
California’s counter is institutional: no authority, no federal data access, and a mail system built to strip identifying envelopes after signature verification. That design may speed counting. It also collides with a last-minute demand to pull specific envelopes back out of a stream that has already been running hard in the state’s largest county.
The Oct. 15 suit landed after ballots were already in the mail. The emergency appeal landed after the district judge missed the department’s requested deadline. The Ninth Circuit’s noon-Saturday response order now sits between those two failures of timing, one on the state’s mailing calendar, one on the district court’s clock.
Tuesday’s hearing before Judge Carter remains on the calendar. Whether the appeals court rules before then is still an open question in the reporting. What is not open is the department’s stated reason for speed: every minute of unsegregated processing, it argues, risks permanent dilution of United States citizens’ votes.
Lawful voters should not have to hope their ballots outweigh ones the federal government has already flagged. If California cannot or will not sequester the list, the courts will have to say whether citizen votes get real protection, or only another process argument after the envelopes are gone.
