The Supreme Court has responded to the Trump DOJ's 11th-hour push to force California to segregate thousands of mail-in ballots mailed to alleged non-citizens.
On Monday — the day before midterms — the DOJ escalated a legal fight over 20,000 mail-in ballots sent to registered voters who are suspected to be non-citizens.
Specifically, the DOJ asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block California from counting these ballots.
We covered the background in detail here:
President Trump's DOJ Asks Supreme Court To Segregate 20,000 Disputed California Ballots
However, just hours after the DOJ filed the request, the Supreme Court has denied it.
The short, one-line ruling did not list any explanation as to why the request was denied.
Here are the details:
🚨 BREAKING: The Supreme Court just REJECTED the Trump administration's emergency request to make California set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots from voters the feds flagged as noncitizens
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 2, 2026
UNREAL.
That means those ballots get mixed in with everyone else's on Election Day.… pic.twitter.com/N2nxjUAwTp
BREAKING: The Supreme Court just REJECTED the Trump administration's emergency request to make California set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots from voters the feds flagged as noncitizens
UNREAL.
That means those ballots get mixed in with everyone else's on Election Day.
John Sauer warned the justices: "Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back."
A district judge, a split Ninth Circuit, Judge Boasberg, and now SCOTUS have all refused to act. Absolutely outrageous.
If even a fraction of those voters turn out to be noncitizens, nobody will be able to pull those votes back out 😡
Get out and vote TOMORROW!
Take a look at the order for yourself:
BREAKING: The Supreme Court denied the Trump administration's emergency request to force California to set aside mail-in ballots from roughly 20,000 suspected noncitizens until their citizenship could be verified, one day before the midterm elections. pic.twitter.com/hjQzYV7Ht3
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) November 2, 2026
This is the latest in a series of defeats for the Trump administration related to sketchy mail-in ballots in California.
Also on Monday, notorious left-wing Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to stop trying to get California election officials to segregate disputed ballots.
AP News reported further:
The high court refused to immediately intervene in a case involving 20,000 people the Republican administration flagged as likely noncitizens on the largely Democratic state's voter rolls.
The swift rejection capped a string of losses for the president's effort to intervene in the election before the counting of ballots to decide who controls Congress in the last two years of his second term. No justices publicly dissented.
Several lower courts also rejected the Justice Department's push to set aside the challenged California ballots until the voters' citizenship status could be verified. In Alaska, a judge did not even hold a hearing before dismissing a Trump-ordered suit to prevent a possible Democratic Senate win.
The high court did not detail its reasoning, as is common in emergency decisions. The justices previously rejected Trump's push to restrict mail ballots around the country in September, even though the justices have sided with his administration in a series of other emergency docket appeals.
The Republican administration has prioritized identifying noncitizen voters this year, despite them being rare. California officials said the administration's list appeared to be filled with errors and that setting the ballots aside could effectively disenfranchise legal voters.
Also on Monday in Washington, another federal judge ruled against the administration's efforts to make last-minute demands of California election officials, finding they violated the U.S. Constitution.
"The Executive Branch has likely violated the Constitution's Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone," Chief Judge James Boasberg wrote.
The administration, for its part, said segregating the ballots was a modest request that would eventually allow legal votes to still be counted.
The administration's push has faced a remarkable series of losses in court, as well as criticism for waiting until a few weeks before the election to make its demands of California election officials with a list that even the Department of Justice admits is not entirely reliable.
During a hearing over whether to lift her own order forbidding the administration from threatening to prosecute election workers who let potentially illegal voters cast ballots, District Court Judge Trina Thompson drilled down on reports of widespread inaccuracies in the Justice Department's data.
"Would you agree there's a high error rate?" Thompson asked Kenneth Kao, a Justice Department attorney.
"That's a fair statement," Kao said. "That's why we ask for the registrars' aid in verifying these are all valid voters."
At the same time, Bill Essayli, the federal prosecutor running the Justice Department's Los Angeles office, said at a news conference he was highly confident the people on the list were not entitled to vote.
"This isn't speculation. This isn't a theory," Essayli said, later conceding there may be errors on the list.
Voting has been underway in California, a largely Democratic state, since early October. All of the state's roughly 23 million registered voters are mailed a ballot. Hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been processed. California election officials have said that finding and setting aside the challenged ballots now would be logistically impossible.
While this is a setback, the battle over fair elections is far from over.
Folks on X have some suggestions:
Fine then. Arrest, prosecute, and deport every non-citizen who cast an illegal ballot.
— Big Screen D (@NoOne23131214) November 2, 2026
The Trump administration should immediately deploy military troops to every vote center in California in the name of arresting illegal aliens and other invaders in the state. No excuses.
— BongBong (@BongBong) November 2, 2026
Arrests all 20,000 people.
— Thomas USA (@ThomasSickler) November 2, 2026
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