A coalition of civil rights groups is asking a federal court in California to halt a Department of Homeland Security initiative that, they allege, uses unreliable records to scrutinize naturalized and derivative U.S. citizens. The complaint says federal agents have posed as individual voters to obtain private registration information from state election websites, and that people flagged by the initiative could face further investigation, including questioning at home. Those claims have not been established by a court.
The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, case number 3:26-cv-12617. The plaintiffs include community and voting-rights organizations, among them Common Cause and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC. They say USCIS has operated the Unlawful Voter Initiative since August 2026, using citizenship checks to identify foreign-born citizens.
The challenge centers on data and voter protections
The organizations seek an order stopping DHS and USCIS from continuing the initiative and preventing federal pressure on states to withhold or discard valid ballots cast by people appearing on federal lists. They also ask the court to find that the program violates the Civil Rights Act’s Uniform Standards Provision, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, according to the ACLU of Southern California, which says the plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
The dispute comes amid documented problems with citizenship data matching. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that DHS ran 49.5 million voter records through the SAVE system and appeared to flag about 10,000 registrants as potential noncitizens—roughly 0.02% of the records searched. A flag is not, by itself, proof that a person is ineligible. The center says mismatches can arise from differences in names, birth dates, gender information and records across databases.
Reviews of specific lists have also produced sharply different results after manual checks. In Nevada, a DHS list of as many as 15,903 potential noncitizen registrants was reduced to 185; all 185 were U.S. citizens, according to American Community Media. In a preliminary sample of 200 people from a separate list of 7,035 California voters, Los Angeles County found that more than one in four records listed a U.S. birthplace, the outlet reported. These examples concern particular lists and reviews; they do not establish what happened to every person examined under the initiative now challenged.
A separate federal case has already placed limits on DHS field operations in nine states. As NPR reported, a judge barred officers there from conducting operations against people they know, suspect or reasonably should suspect are citizens, or from acting solely on USCIS data-matching without further investigation. The ruling is distinct from the new California lawsuit.
An earlier state review offers a limited comparison
In 2019, Texas officials agreed to end a flawed state-level review that had questioned the citizenship of almost 100,000 registered voters, KUT reported. That episode was not the federal DHS initiative at issue now, but it illustrates why a large citizenship-based list can require careful verification before it is used to challenge registrations.
