OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates v. Department of Homeland Security

Following President Trump’s repeated and false assertions of widespread noncitizens voting in federal elections, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have initiated a sweeping effort to investigate thousands of naturalized and derivative citizens under the guise of voter eligibility checks.

Under what DHS and USCIS call the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” federal agents are using outdated, error-prone data and highly questionable methods to investigate naturalized and derived citizens’ voting qualifications. USCIS officials have described this investigatory process as relying on “magic,” and it requires federal agents to illegally pose as individual voters to search private voter registration records on state election websites.

This slipshod investigatory process creates real consequences for citizens wrongly identified by the Initiative as unlawful voters. It causes them to be subject to further investigative scrutiny, such as door-to-door interrogations. But that’s not all – the federal government has also demanded that state election officials withhold or discard the ballots of individuals identified by the Unlawful Voter Initiative, subjecting these people to potential disenfranchisement

All of this is unlawful. By targeting naturalized and derived citizens for voter eligibility investigations, the Unlawful Voter Initiative violates a key provision of the Civil Rights Act intended to protect against these kinds of discriminatory voter investigations. And through its reliance on flawed data and faulty processes, the Initiative also violates the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The ACLU—along with its partners ACLU of Northern California, ACLU of Southern California, Asian American Advancing Justice (AAJC), and Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California (AJSOCAL)—has filed a lawsuit on behalf of OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, OCA-San Mateo, OCA-Sacramento, and Common Cause to stop DHS and USCIS from continuing to target eligible voters for disenfranchisement based on the government’s unreliable data.

The case was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on October 28, 2026.