President Trump made citizen-only elections a centerpiece of his second term.
His Justice Department started hauling accused illegal voters into federal court.
And one Biden judge in Miami just handed down a ruling that left Trump’s election integrity team scrambling.
A Miami courtroom turned a 30-year-old law upside down
Congress made it a federal crime in 1996 for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election. A Republican Congress passed that law, a Democrat President signed it, and for three decades no federal court struck it down.
US District Judge David Leibowitz just did.
Leibowitz, a Miami-based judge President Joe Biden nominated to the bench, threw out the federal case against Florida resident Chelsea Cox, a Jamaican national prosecutors charged in 2025 with illegally voting in the 2020 election. His 31-page ruling found the 1996 law unconstitutional as applied to her. Reuters reported the decision appears to mark the first time a federal court reached that conclusion.
The allegations against Cox aren’t small. According to a court filing by the government, she entered the US as a tourist in 1999 and stayed after her visa expired the following year. Prosecutors allege she used a fraudulent US Virgin Islands birth certificate to get a Florida driver’s license, then used those documents to register to vote in 2012.
Records show she voted in federal elections from 2012 to 2020, according to Reuters. Only the 2020 vote fell inside the statute of limitations.
But Leibowitz never ruled on whether Cox broke the rules. He found that the Constitution hands the power to set voter qualifications to “the States, and the States alone,” and that Congress overstepped when it wrote a citizenship rule of its own.
Every state already requires citizenship to vote. So Leibowitz said the job of prosecuting Cox belongs to Florida.
“Florida can and does,” he wrote.
What the Justice Department told the judge
Federal prosecutors read the Constitution differently. Their filing told the court that Congress, and no single state, has the best tools to handle immigration and foreign affairs.
“Foreign interference in elections is clearly within the purview of Congress,” prosecutors wrote.
That’s a hard point to wave away. A foreign national allegedly casting ballots for President and Congress for the better part of a decade sounds like the kind of thing a national government exists to police.
Cox’s attorney, Bruce Udolf, cheered the decision. He said government officials would be “well-advised to walk away from this without further reprisal against her.” Udolf also said he hoped the government would not move to deport Cox, citing her declining health.
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to Reuters’ requests for comment.
And the ruling has limits. It covers Cox’s case alone and binds no other judge. But Reuters counted about 45 pending noncitizen voting cases around the country, and at least four other defendants have raised similar challenges to the law.
Those judges don’t have to follow Leibowitz. They can certainly borrow from him.
The states’ rights argument the Left suddenly loves
For years, Democrats in Washington, DC pushed sweeping federal election bills that would have overridden state voter ID laws, state registration rules, and state mail-in ballot deadlines. The pitch back then held that Congress enjoyed broad authority over how states run federal elections. States’ rights were a relic.
And now a Biden-nominated judge finds that Congress can’t tell a foreign citizen to stay out of a Presidential election? Funny how federalism turns up right on schedule.
To be fair to the opinion, the Constitution’s text does leave voter qualifications largely to the states, and plenty of conservatives have made that argument in other fights. But the practical effect matters more than the theory. A prosecutor in a deep-blue county has no obligation to bring one of these cases. Take federal law off the table and enforcement of citizen-only voting depends on the political mood of whoever runs the local courthouse.
Trump’s critics say the whole crackdown chases a rare problem. A Reuters investigation found 129 people charged under the “voting by an alien” statute. Reuters reported that most held lawful permanent resident status and registered by mistake or on bad advice from a clerk, and that prosecutors accused no defendant of conspiring to sway an election.
But look at what that number measures. It counts the people somebody caught. Cox allegedly voted for eight years before a single federal charge landed.
And New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said in 2026 that about 400 noncitizens in her state voted after a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 people in 2023 and 2024. Nobody planned that. It happened anyway.
The Justice Department has demanded those names, nationalities, and addresses. It has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting since Trump returned to office in January 2025, and Reuters reported the administration has been deporting defendants, since illegal voting is grounds for removal.
Where the fight over citizen-only elections goes next
Trump has said stricter enforcement of documented citizenship is needed for election integrity. Most of the country agrees with him. An Economist/YouGov poll from March 2026 found 59% of Americans support requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, with 29% opposed. A Rasmussen Reports survey from summer 2026 found 82% of likely voters said only American citizens should vote in US elections.
That’s the whole idea behind the SAVE Act, the commonsense bill that would require proof of citizenship before anyone registers for a federal election. Versions of it cleared the House and stalled in the Senate.
Millions of Americans still have questions about how the 2020 election was run, with voting rules rewritten at the last minute under cover of COVID. A ruling like this one won’t settle their nerves. If anything, it tells them the one federal statute aimed squarely at noncitizen voting now stands on shaky ground.
The likely next stop is an appeals court, and nobody should pretend to know how that ends. Maybe the Leibowitz opinion stays a one-off. Maybe four more judges sign on and the 1996 law starts to come apart case by case.
Either way, the question of who polices a foreign citizen’s ballot just got a lot messier. And the answer may now depend on which state that ballot lands in.
Sources:
New York Post / Reuters, “US judge rules law criminalizing noncitizen voting is unconstitutional in blow to Trump”
Fox News, “‘Activist judge’ rules Congress cannot bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections”
Florida Politics, “Miami Judge’s ruling on noncitizen voting case rejects federal ban as unconstitutional”
The Economist / YouGov Poll, March 2026, proof of citizenship to register to vote
Rasmussen Reports survey, July 2026, SAVE America Act
18 USC 611, “Voting by aliens,” US Code
