A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit demanding California turn over its voter rolls, calling the request “unprecedented and illegal” and accusing the federal government of trying to “abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots.”

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee based in Santa Ana, questioned the Justice Department’s motivations and called its lawsuit demanding voter data from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber not just an overreach into state-run elections, but a threat to American democracy.

“The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose,” Carter wrote. “This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.”

Carter wrote that the “taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece by piece until there is nothing left,” and that the Justice Department’s lawsuit was “one of these cuts that imperils all Americans.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

In a video she posted to the social media platform X earlier Thursday, Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon — who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — said she was proud of her office’s efforts to “clean up the voter rolls nationally,” including by suing states for their data.

“We are going to touch every single state and finish this project,” she said.

Weber, who is California’s top elections official, said in a written statement that she is “entrusted with ensuring that California’s state election laws are enforced — including state laws that protect the privacy of California’s data.”

“I will continue to uphold my promise to Californians to protect our democracy, and I will continue to challenge this administration’s disregard for the rule of law and our right to vote,” Weber said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called the decision another example of “Trump and his administration losing to California” — one day after another court upheld California’s congressional redistricting plan under Proposition 50, which the Trump administration also challenged in court after state voters passed it overwhelmingly in November.

The Justice Department sued Weber in September after she refused to hand over detailed voter information for some 23 million Californians, alleging that she was unlawfully preventing federal authorities from ensuring state compliance with federal voting regulations and safeguarding federal elections against fraud.

It separately sued Weber’s counterparts in various other states who also declined the department’s requests for their states’ voter rolls.

The lawsuit followed an executive order by President Trump in March that purported to require voters to provide proof of citizenship and ordered states to disregard mail ballots not received by election day. It also followed years of allegations by Trump, made without evidence, that voting in California has been hampered by widespread fraud and voting by noncitizens — part of his broader and equally unsupported claim that the 2020 presidental election was stolen from him.

In announcing the lawsuit, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in September that “clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” and that the Justice Department was going to ensure that they exist nationwide.

Weber denounced the lawsuit at the time as a “fishing expedition and pretext for partisan policy objectives,” and as “an unprecedented intrusion unsupported by law or any previous practice or policy of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The Justice Department demanded a “current electronic copy of California’s computerized statewide voter registration list”; lists of “all duplicate registration records in Imperial, Los Angeles, Napa, Nevada, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, and Stanislaus counties”; a “list of all duplicate registrants who were removed from the statewide voter registration list”; and the dates of their removals.

It also demanded a list of all registrations that had been canceled due to voter deaths; an explanation for a recent decline in the recorded number of “inactive” voters in California; and a list of “all registrations, including date of birth, driver’s license number, and last four digits of Social Security Number, that were canceled due to non-citizenship of the registrant.”

Carter, in his ruling Thursday, took particular issue with the Justice Department’s reliance on federal civil rights laws to make its case.

“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data. This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation,” Carter wrote.

Carter wrote that the legislation in question — including Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 — was passed to defend Black Americans’ voting rights in the face of “persistent voter suppression” and to “combat the effects of discriminatory and unfair registration laws that cheapened the right to vote.”

Carter found that the Justice Department provided “no explanation for why unredacted voter files for millions of Californians, an unprecedented request, was necessary” for the Justice Department to investigate the alleged problems it claims, and that the executive branch simply has no power to demand such data all at once without explanation.

A federal judge criticized the process by which California’s voter-approved congressional map to redraw districts to favor Democrats in a dissenting opinion, saying the state engaged in “racial gerrymandering.”

Judge Kenneth Lee noted his concerns about race being a factor in his dissent as a panel of judges voted 2-1 to uphold the map.

“California sullied its hands with this sordid business when it engaged in racial gerrymandering as part of its mid-decade congressional redistricting plan to add five more Democratic House seats,” Lee wrote. 

“We know race likely played a predominant role in drawing at least one district because the smoking gun is in the hands of Paul Mitchell, the mapmaker who drew the congressional redistricting map adopted by the California state legislature,” he added. 

DOJ ACCUSES DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN ARM OF OBSTRUCTION IN LAWSUIT OVER CALIFORNIA REDISTRICTING

The court rejected a claim by Republicans that the map approved as part of Proposition 50 violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing maps to favor Hispanic and Latino voters.

READ THE COURT ORDER – APP USERS, CLICK HERE:

The decision allows California to use the map, which could give Democrats more House seats. The California Republican Party said it will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to issue an emergency injunction. 

“The well-reasoned dissenting opinion better reflects our interpretation of the law and the facts, which we will reassert to the Supreme Court,” California GOP Chairwoman Corrin Rankin said in a statement. “The map drawer’s plain statements acknowledging that he racially gerrymandered the Proposition 50 maps, which he and the legislature refused to explain or deny, in addition to our experts’ testimony, established that the courts should stop the implementation of the Prop 50 map. We look forward to continuing this fight in the courts.” 

REPUBLICANS PUSH BACK OVER ‘FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF RACISM’ IN BLOCKBUSTER REDISTRICTING FIGHT

Lee noted that mapmaker Paul Mitchell refused to appear before the panel, but had allegedly publicly boasted to his political allies that he drew the map to “ensure that the Latino districts.”

“In embarking on a mid-decade redistricting plan to create more Democratic-friendly districts, California relied on race to create at least one Latino-majority congressional district,” he wrote. “To be clear, as the majority explains, California began its mid-cycle redistricting attempt after Texas initiated its own redistricting in favor of Republicans. But that larger partisan goal does not negate that California’s Democratic state legislature sought to maintain and expand a racial spoils system.”

Prop 50 was the result of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democratic leaders asking voters whether the state should redraw congressional lines by targeting five Republican strongholds. 

The move was a countermeasure to Texas’ efforts to send more Republicans to the House. 

“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed,” Newsom said in a statement. “California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 50 – to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas – and that is exactly what this court concluded.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

House maps are typically redrawn every 10 years following the census, and the process rarely takes place mid-decade.

Fox News Digital’s Michael Sinkewicz contributed to this report. 

President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act Thursday as part of his immigration crackdown, blaming politicians in Minnesota who have opposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ presence in the city and decried their violence against protesters.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

The president made his threat a day after a federal immigration officer shot a Minneapolis man in the leg. The agency said the man attacked federal officers with a shovel and a broom as they tried to complete a targeted traffic stop.

If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, he could deploy federal troops to the state.

Protests have intensified in the Minnesota city in the last week since an ICE agent shot Renee Good, a local woman who was part of a group observing ICE activity, in the head.

Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed as she took part in an “ICE watch” protest documenting federal immigration activity, after three ICE agents surrounded her SUV on a snowy street.

Bystander videos shows one immigration officer ordering Good out of the vehicle and grabbing the door handle as another agent, Jonathan Ross, positions himself in front of her vehicle. As she begins to move the SUV forward, Ross raises his weapon and fires at least three shots at close range.

Ross suffered internal bleeding to his torso from the encounter, according to a statement from Homeland Security officials provided to the Associated Press.

“I would say that our agent is beat up, he’s bruised, he’s injured, he’s getting treatment,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters Thursday, saying the agency was “thankful that he made it out alive.”

Video from the incident showed Ross curse at Good after shooting her then walking away from the incident.

After Good was fatally shot, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told ICE to “get the f— out of Minneapolis” and dubbed federal claims that its officers killed Good in self defense “bulls—.” Still, he has urged residents to act peacefully, warning them Trump could call in the military.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has also spoken out against ICE and earlier this week, the state’s Atty. Gen. Keith Ellison filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, asking the court to block the surge of Homeland Security agents into the state and declare it unconstitutional and unlawful.

“Over the last week, we’ve seen federal agents arresting, threatening, and using force against innocent bystanders,” Walz said Monday in a statement. “They have carried out enforcement actions in schools, at hospitals, and in one horrific instance shot and killed someone… This operation was never about safety, it’s a targeted political operation and Minnesota won’t stand for it.”

On Thursday, Noem singled out Walz for criticism, telling reporters outside the White House that the Minnesota governor is “still is not willing to work with our federal officers to bring peace to the streets of Minneapolis.”

The federal government had no plans to pull out of Minnesota, Noem said, noting she had discussed the Insurrection Act with Trump.

“He certainly has the constitutional authority to utilize that,” she said. “My hope is that this leadership team in Minnesota will start to work with us to get criminals off the streets.”

Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche has also singled out Walz and Frey.

“Minnesota insurrection is a direct result of a FAILED governor and a TERRIBLE mayor encouraging violence against law enforcement,” he said on X. “It’s disgusting. Walz and Frey — I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”

The Insurrection Act, established in 1807, is a federal law that allows a president to deploy the military domestically to suppress in specific circumstances, such as civil disorder, an insurrection, or armed rebellion against the federal government.

If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, he would be empowering the military to make arrests and perform searches on U.S. soil. In normal circumstances, the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law enacted after the Civil War, forbids active-duty federal forces to provide regular civilian law enforcement unless authorized by Congress or the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

The president first threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against protesters in the summer of 2020, but members of his Cabinet and military advisors blocked the move. In June 2025, he repeated the threat against protesters in Los Angeles as people took to the streets to protest ICE raids.

“The people who are causing the problems are bad people,” Trump told reporters then, “they are insurrectionists.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.