California Nurses Association et al. v. Mullin et al.

Update: On October 21, 2026, the Northern District of California granted Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, ruling that, during this active election season, DHS cannot engage in election-related operations against people it suspects or should suspect are U.S. citizens. That means DHS cannot use its faulty data to investigate citizens — including naturalized citizens and other citizens in immigrant communities — and question them about their voting plans.

Case Overview

In California Nurses Association et al. v. Mullin et al., NILC and Protect Democracy have partnered with the City of San Francisco and Santa Clara County to bring suit to stop the Trump administration’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” a policy adopted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that intimidates voters by sending armed federal agents to Americans’ homes to question their eligibility to vote.

As revealed by recent reporting and a recent whistleblower report (PDF), DHS has undertaken an unprecedented effort to amass sensitive information on Americans, attempt to identify non-U.S. citizens who are registered to vote or may have voted, and confront targeted individuals at their homes or in their cars across the country. Lacking a comprehensive database of U.S. citizens or access to most states’ voter rolls, DHS has turned to its own unreliable data, publicly available voter files, “supplemental magic,” and error-prone manual name and date-of-birth matching to build a list of investigatory targets. As of mid-September 2026, those lists may include as many as 300,000 people, many of whom are almost certainly naturalized U.S. citizens, U.S. citizens in mixed-immigration-status families, or U.S. citizens of color. Nevertheless, this inaccurate list forms the basis of field operations in which armed DHS agents are targeting people to question them about their citizenship and voting history during the height of electoral activity related to the 2026 mid-term election. This is a policy of voter intimidation.

To stop DHS’s unlawful activity, we are suing DHS under the Voting Rights Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the U.S. Constitution. In this suit, we and Protect Democracy represent the California Nurses Association, National Nurses United, the Voto Latino Foundation, the City and County of San Francisco, and Santa Clara County.