Obama-appointed U.S. District Chief Judge James E. Boasberg, long criticized as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge,” gave the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and its UCLA Voting Rights Project allies tightly restricted access to the Trump Department of Justice’s list of more than 20,000 people federal investigators flagged as likely noncitizens who received mail ballots in California. The court order was crystal clear: the data was for standing arguments only. Plaintiffs could not disclose names and could not use the information for broader political or media attacks on the government’s election-integrity efforts. That restriction lasted roughly 24 hours.
On Friday, October 30, Boasberg ordered the DOJ to turn over the list by 5 p.m. so CHIRLA could check whether any of its members appeared on it for purposes of standing in their lawsuit seeking to block the administration’s actions. By Saturday, CHIRLA’s experts, UCLA political scientist Matt Barreto and data scientist Michael Rios, had filed a supplemental declaration. Their analysis claimed that roughly 42% of the names (about 8,880 out of 20,930) did not appear on California’s current voter file, that at least 22 people on the list were likely naturalized U.S. citizens, and that thousands more citizens may have been flagged. They went further, extrapolating to statewide impacts and criticizing the list’s methodology, completeness, missing fields, and potential false positives on a scale that reached hundreds of thousands of naturalized citizens.
