Judge imposes sweeping emergency order ending DOJ’s pressure campaign on election officials across the country

A federal judge imposed a sweeping emergency order halting various aggressive tactics employed by the Trump administration in recent days to pressure election officials across the country.

“Although defendants assert that their actions are intended to stop illegal non-citizen voting, their actions will likely have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising legal voters,” U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson said in her opinion in granting a temporary restraining order Friday evening.

She said that while her order is in effect, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security cannot require a state’s election officials to segregate ballots, purge voters from voter rolls or stop processing ballots. Thompson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, is also blocking threats of criminal prosecution against election officials from those agencies and said the administration cannot take further actions that “threaten, intimidate, or coerce” election officials into demanding changes in ballot processing procedures under the pretense that voters are ineligible.

Thompson’s opinion refutes the administration’s claims for months that it can and will sue election officials for not doing enough to prevent illegal voting.

“When state and local government employees carry out the work of distributing, processing, or counting ballots or administering the 2026 midterm elections” in accordance with the law, “they are not violating federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote,” she wrote.

It also asks the administration to notify it of any “requests for search warrants, grand jury subpoenas, or other requests for access to election materials or ballots” that have been issued in connection with the lists the administration has created to allege that individuals are ineligible to vote.

The judge set his order to expire on November 16. CNN has contacted the Justice Department for comment.

The case was brought in the Northern District of California – a court known for its left-leaning nature – by a coalition of unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens. They claim the administration’s recent conduct violates the Voting Rights Act and constitutes an unconstitutional intrusion into state control over election administration.

At the heart of the administration’s efforts is a controversial data-matching operation run by DHS, which compared state voter rolls with federal records. Election officials say the lists of suspected noncitizens created by DHS using the program are unreliable and include U.S. citizens.

Several judges are now considering this approach in cases filed in recent weeks.

The Trump administration’s aggressive efforts are increasingly failing in court — as the federal government tries to force states to cooperate with the campaign it says aims to keep noncitizens from voting.

Despite the lawsuits, the Justice Department sought to increase pressure, sending letters to 29 states and Washington, D.C., threatening investigations and demanding that they preserve voter records and data from the 2024 election. Federal law already requires jurisdictions to retain records for 22 months after an election.

In California, where the Justice Department sued to try to block the counting of the ballots of thousands of voters who the federal government said might be noncitizens, a federal appeals court rejected the administration’s requests.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the administration has no right to interfere in how states verify citizenship status.

CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report.

This story has been updated with additional details.