The 20,000-Name California List Meets the Vacatur: DOJ Appeals, and Common Cause/CREW Say the Letters "Appear to Implicate — and Perhaps Outright Violate" Sookhanan's Order
UPDATE (Oct. 16–19, 2026): The administration is running the voter-roll hunt through channels it says the vacatur doesn't reach — and the judge who vacated it is being asked to stop it.
Three moves landed in three days. First, the DOJ told a court Friday (Oct. 16) that it plans to appeal Judge Sparkle Sookhanan's Oct. 9 vacatur of the nationwide voter-roll policy. Second, Common Cause and CREW asked Sookhanan to hold a hearing on whether the Oct. 13 letters to California and the new lawsuit violate her order, writing that "by attempting to superintend voter roll list maintenance and prohibit registered voters from exercising the franchise without adequate consideration of the reliability of the underlying data, DOJ's October 13 letters and the actions described in the California (lawsuit) appear to implicate — and perhaps outright violate" her decision. Sookhanan ordered DOJ to respond by Monday, Oct. 19. Third, the government's theory of escape is now on the record: DOJ trial attorney Christian Dibblee wrote in an email filed in court that DHS used a publicly available California voter roll plus ICE internal data — not the vacated SAVE-based pipeline — and that Sookhanan's order "does not extend to using other methods, nor does it prohibit taking enforcement actions based on those other methods."
The complaint's own methodology section shows why the reliability fight matters: ICE compares "information about voter rolls" with "its internal data," assigns low/medium/high confidence levels, then routes matches through HSI's "analytical data enrichment process." The numbers keep collapsing under scrutiny — the summer claim of up to 190,000 noncitizen registrants in California has become ~20,000 after "manual verification," about 0.08% of the state's 23.2 million registered voters. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called even one noncitizen vote "completely unacceptable"; California AG Rob Bonta answered: "Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there's no widespread voter fraud in the U.S. The Trump Admin's last-minute demands are meritless."
This is the same database at the center of SAVE Voter-Citizenship Database: Opposition Briefed at SCOTUS as Ruling Looms and the LWV/EPIC/LULAC deletion suit — now being used for pre-election disenfranchisement-by-litigation with ballots already mailing.