Naturalized and derivative U.S. citizens on a Department of Homeland Security list of suspected noncitizen voters are the subject of a federal lawsuit filed October 28, 2026, which alleges USCIS’s Unlawful Voter Initiative investigates them in ways U.S.-born citizens never face. The suit asks a court to end the program and erase its records; it is not a class action, and there is nothing to claim.
Allegations Only · Not a Class Action
This article describes a lawsuit against federal agencies. The statements below are unproven allegations, many drawn from a whistleblower disclosure. No court has ruled on them, the government had not responded in court as of November 2, 2026, and there is nothing to claim. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
What Is the Lawsuit About?
Four organizations sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow on October 28, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case is OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates v. United States Department of Homeland Security, No. 26-cv-12617. The plaintiffs are OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, a national civil rights group that is not affiliated with OpenClassActions.com, two of its California chapters, OCA-San Mateo and OCA-Sacramento, and Common Cause. They are represented by the ACLU and its Northern and Southern California affiliates and by two Asian Americans Advancing Justice organizations.The suit challenges what the complaint calls the Unlawful Voter Initiative, a policy it says USCIS adopted in August 2026. According to the complaint, agents review people on a DHS list of suspected noncitizen voters, check their voting records on state voter websites and, when they suspect unlawful voting, create a record about the person in TECS, a federal law enforcement database. The plaintiffs say their members include naturalized citizens who registered and voted only after becoming citizens and who now face scrutiny that U.S.-born voters do not. The officials are sued in their official capacities.
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What the Complaint Says the Program Does
Much of the complaint’s account of the program comes from a whistleblower disclosure that Senators Alex Padilla and Charles Schumer sent to Secretary Mullin and Director Edlow on September 13, 2026. The complaint alleges:- A list built from mixed data. On August 21, 2026, agents in USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate were told to stop other work and watch a training video introducing the initiative. They received a DHS list with personal information on hundreds of thousands of people in all 50 states, drawn, according to the training materials, from the State Department, the Social Security Administration, the Justice Department, commercial databases such as Accurint and CLEAR, and USCIS’s SAVE verification system.
- Only people with immigration numbers. Everyone on the list has an Alien Registration Number. U.S.-born citizens do not have one, so the complaint says only naturalized and derivative citizens can be reviewed.
- Data the agency itself questioned. The complaint quotes the training as saying the A-Numbers were “brought in through supplemental magic,” that agents should “not rely on” the Social Security numbers on the list, and that “it can be very difficult to determine if a subject is a U.S. citizen or not.”
- State voter websites. Agents were told to look up people’s voting history on state voter lookup portals. The complaint says some portals, including those of Florida, Virginia and Massachusetts, require the user to certify that they are the voter or have the voter’s permission, and that DHS lawyers told agents the searches were permissible.
- A quota and a record. The whistleblower reported a quota of at least five subjects an hour and 40 a day. Agents who suspected unlawful voting had to create a TECS record, and the complaint says they were told they could not complete the assignment without creating records that relied only on the DHS data.
How It Connects to the Ballot Disputes
The complaint ties the initiative to the federal government’s demands about ballots. It says the list of about 20,000 California voters at the center of the Justice Department’s lawsuit against California was developed in part by USCIS’s fraud detection unit, and alleges that list comes from the initiative. It cites a declaration filed in that case by Los Angeles County, which compared a sample of the list with county records: of the sampled people whose records listed a place of birth, 38.9% were born in the United States, and 71.2% of the whole sample had never voted. It also points to an October 26 federal letter asking Washington state to set aside ballots from 405 voters.The complaint also cites a declaration in the California case by a USCIS fraud-detection official, who said the data on the list “may be incomplete, outdated, or mismatched,” and a statement by Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter that some people on the California list may turn out to be citizens.
A separate case in the same court, California Nurses Association v. Mullin, No. 26-cv-10680, produced an October 21, 2026 preliminary injunction that, according to the new complaint, bars federal agents’ door-to-door visits to voters in California and eight other states until polls close on November 3, 2026. The complaint says the court in that case did not decide whether the initiative itself is lawful.
The Legal Claims
The complaint brings five claims:- Two under the Civil Rights Act’s uniform standards provision, 52 U.S.C. § 10101(a)(2)(A), which bars officials from applying different standards to different voters when deciding whether they are qualified to vote. One is brought directly and one through the Administrative Procedure Act.
- A Privacy Act claim, through the APA, alleging the agencies do not keep the records they use to make determinations about people accurate and complete enough to be fair.
- An APA claim that the initiative is arbitrary and capricious, including allegations that searching state voter portals this way violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the agencies’ own rules.
- An APA claim that the agencies broke their own privacy handbooks and policies on handling sensitive personal information.
What the Plaintiffs Are Asking For
The plaintiffs ask the court to declare the initiative unlawful, to stop further investigations under it, to bar DHS from demanding that state or local election officials withhold or refuse to count a ballot because the voter appears on the DHS list or a similar list, to vacate the initiative, and to order the agencies to expunge the TECS records and other records created under it. They also seek attorneys’ fees and costs. The complaint does not seek money for individual voters.Where the Case Stands
The case has already moved between judges. It was first assigned to Judge Beth Labson Freeman, who recused herself on October 29, 2026, and it was reassigned that day to Judge P. Casey Pitts. Judge Pitts referred it to Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín to decide whether it is related to the California Nurses Association case. On October 30 she found the two cases related, and also found that the nurses’ case is not related to SEIU v. U.S. Department of Justice, No. 26-cv-12800, the election workers’ suit. On November 2 the case was reassigned to Judge Martínez-Olguín, and the reassignment order vacated previously scheduled hearing dates.Through the docket’s latest entries on November 2, 2026, there was no answer or motion from the government, and no request by the plaintiffs for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. The complaint’s header lists the case as No. 3:26-cv-12617; the number before the colon identifies the courthouse and changes as the case moves between judges, so the docket number is cited here without it.
Questions
What is the USCIS Unlawful Voter Initiative?
According to the lawsuit, it is a program USCIS adopted in August 2026 in which agents review people on a DHS list of suspected noncitizen voters, look up their voting history on state voter websites, and create records in the federal TECS law enforcement database for those they suspect voted unlawfully. The complaint says everyone on the list has an Alien Registration Number, which U.S.-born citizens do not have. These descriptions come from the complaint and a whistleblower disclosure it cites; the government had not responded in court as of November 2, 2026.
Is the Unlawful Voter Initiative lawsuit a class action?
It is not. The plaintiffs are four organizations suing on behalf of their members, and they ask for a declaration, an injunction, an order setting the program aside and the deletion of records it created. The suit does not seek money, and there is nothing for individuals to claim or sign up for.
What is a TECS record?
TECS is a law enforcement records system owned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and used by several federal agencies. The complaint says a TECS record flagging a suspected violation can lead to extra questioning at ports of entry and can affect eligibility for programs such as trusted traveler programs. A record of this kind is an investigative flag, not a criminal charge.
How is this lawsuit related to DOJ’s case against California?
The complaint says the federal government’s list of about 20,000 California voters it calls likely noncitizens, at the center of United States v. California, was developed in part by USCIS’s fraud detection unit, and alleges that list comes from the Unlawful Voter Initiative. It asks the court to bar DHS from demanding that states withhold or refuse to count ballots based on that kind of list.
Who is OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates?
It is a national nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1973 as the Organization of Chinese Americans, headquartered in Washington, D.C. It is the lead plaintiff in this case and is not affiliated with OpenClassActions.com.
Sources
• Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates v. United States Department of Homeland Security, No. 26-cv-12617 (N.D. Cal., filed October 28, 2026): complaint (PDF).• Court docket: OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates v. DHS (CourtListener), including the October 29 order of recusal, the October 30 judicial referral and the October 30 related-case order.
• OCA’s coverage of DOJ’s lawsuit against California over mail ballots.
