Justice Department Seeks Contempt Sanctions Over CHIRLA Voter Data Analysis

The Department of Justice filed a motion on Sunday seeking contempt sanctions against an immigrant rights organization after it published an analysis of a federal list identifying alleged noncitizen voters in California. The filing asserts that the group, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and its legal team breached a specific court order regarding the use of confidential government data.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg granted CHIRLA access to data on approximately 20,000 individuals on Friday. The judge, based in Washington, D.C., restricted the group’s use of the information to supporting their argument for legal standing in the current lawsuit. He explicitly prohibited the disclosure of individual names from the list during the initial phase of the litigation.

Attorneys for CHIRLA submitted court documents on Saturday revealing that their review found more than 40% of the people on the federal list did not appear in the state’s voter file. The analysis also identified 22 individuals on the list who were likely naturalized U.S. citizens, while noting that thousands of other U.S. citizens appeared to be included. The Justice Department contended that these findings were irrelevant to the specific legal question of standing and therefore constituted a violation of the judge's directive.

The department’s filing described the group’s report as political grandstanding that compared the government’s list to the full California voter file. It requested that Judge Boasberg refer the matter to the Justice Department for an investigation into possible criminal contempt. Alberto Lammers, a spokesman for the UCLA Voting Rights Project which conducted the analysis, stated in an email that plaintiffs’ counsel and experts fully complied with the court’s orders.

In a separate legal action, the Justice Department appealed a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Trina L. Thompson in San Francisco. Thompson barred the department from ordering election offices to remove potential noncitizens from rolls or to separate their ballots. The department noted that Thompson issued the ruling before the government had the opportunity to file its initial arguments in that case. Thompson scheduled a hearing on the appeal for Monday.

This dispute is part of a wider series of challenges to the administration’s noncitizen voter lists. A federal judge in California previously rejected a demand to separate ballots cast by these individuals, citing the risk of last minute orders disrupting the election. California election officials have stated that the list contains numerous errors and that the short timeframe before the election makes it difficult to complete the legally required verification steps. The administration maintains that the list was compiled carefully from state voter registration data compared against federal citizenship records.