A federal appeals court ordered California to answer by noon Saturday the Trump Justice Department’s emergency push to sequester roughly 20,000 mail ballots tied to suspected noncitizens.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit late Friday directed the state to respond to the department’s request seeking to set those ballots aside while eligibility is reviewed, rather than run them through the normal count with everyone else’s votes.
Fox News reported that the Justice Department filed the emergency papers earlier Friday after U.S. District Judge David Carter did not rule by a deadline the department had previously sought. A hearing before Carter remains on the calendar for Tuesday.
Attorney General Todd Blanche and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli pressed the urgency in plain terms.
"This is an emergency,"
their filing stated. They went further on the risk to lawful voters:
"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,"
the department wrote.
Essayli’s office in the Central District of California filed the underlying suit on Oct. 15. That came roughly two weeks after the state began mailing ballots. The suit seeks a court order to keep ballots returned by people on the department’s list from being counted until citizenship is checked.
In a Wednesday interview, Essayli framed the ask as limited and the number as a starting point, not a ceiling.
"We're not asking California to take any drastic steps other than to sequester the ballots from the suspected noncitizens,"
he said. On the scale of the problem he added:
"We believe it's at a minimum of 20,000. That's the floor."
Federal investigators, he said, have evidence those individuals received mail-in ballots in October.
Essayli has also accused California of putting noncitizens on the voter rolls through weak citizenship checks. He and Gov. Gavin Newsom clashed on social media this week. Newsom defended the integrity of the state’s elections and said California was following the law.
California election officials rejected the department’s demands in court filings. They argued that county offices lack both the authority and the access to federal records needed to verify citizenship status.
They also said separation is impossible once a ballot has already been processed. Under the state’s mail-in system, after a signature is verified the ballot is pulled from its identifying envelope and handled with the rest of the stack. At that point the paper is no longer tied to a name.
Court records show how far the machinery has already run. Officials have processed 331,000 ballots in Los Angeles County alone. How many of the listed ballots statewide remain unopened, and how many have already been mixed in, is not laid out in the available filings.
The Ninth Circuit’s order does not decide the merits. It forces California to answer the emergency request by noon Saturday. Whether the appeals court will rule before Tuesday’s hearing before Judge Carter remains unclear.
The department’s position is straightforward: if ballots linked to people who may not be citizens keep moving through the system without a hold, those votes become impossible to unwind later. Lawful citizens then absorb the dilution. California’s position is that the state already follows the law, counties cannot tap federal citizenship databases, and the processing steps themselves make a clean pullback unworkable after the envelope is opened.
That clash is the core of the case. One side wants the suspected ballots parked until eligibility is confirmed. The other side says the request comes too late and exceeds what counties can do. The appeals court has now put a clock on the state’s reply.
Voters who follow the rules deserve a system that can still tell eligible ballots from ineligible ones before the count is locked. California’s answer on Saturday will show whether state officials treat that duty as urgent, or as someone else’s problem.
