President Donald Trump speaks as he visits the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to see the new blue protective coating being applied as part of a renovation project, Thursday, May 7, 2026, in Washington, as White House border czar Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin listen (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein).
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to quickly provide discovery materials to a group of plaintiffs in a lawsuit attempting to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from patrolling voting locations during the midterm elections.
In a 10-page opinion and order, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, a Joe Biden appointee, ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others to release one tranche of discovery materials by Monday, Oct. 26, and another tranche by Wednesday, Oct. 28.
"These requests relate to Defendants' plans for further deployment of criminal and immigration law enforcement at polling locations for 2026 elections and thus implicate Plaintiffs' theory of irreparable harm—that federal agents will intimidate Plaintiffs' members and otherwise impede their exercise of their voting rights," the court observed.
In the underlying case — one of many lawsuits challenging DHS plans to send armed federal agents into voting locations in various states — motions practice has been relatively limited so far.
The litigation was filed in late September. The 65-page lawsuit sketched out the concerns of several labor unions and interest groups, led by the NAACP, and asked for an injunction. To date, the plaintiffs have not filed a separate request for injunctive relief asserting a timely need for the court's intervention.
In their early October request for expedited discovery, the plaintiffs told the judge they needed more information to move forward.
The discovery motion contained six distinct requests: four requests for production and two sets of interrogatories, or highly detailed questions the plaintiffs wanted the government to answer.
The court, however, signed off on just three of those asks, saying the limited victory for the plaintiffs is "properly scoped" in order to fill in the blanks for their "anticipated preliminary injunction motion."
The government must first turn over DHS and Department of Justice records responsive to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests "concerning the deployment of federal law enforcement personnel to polling places, ballot drop boxes, and election offices."
Notably, these FOIA requests are not the plaintiffs' own, but refer to records that have already been produced in the other lawsuits aimed at curbing the presence of armed agents at the polls.
The government complained about this request as an effort to "circumvent FOIA," but AliKhan dismissed that objection in a footnote.
The court explained:
Defendants' argument is beside the point. FOIA "is fundamentally designed to inform the public about agency action and not to benefit private litigants." Although Plaintiffs could have made FOIA requests to Defendants identical to those in the cases they reference, they were under no obligation to do so. The court sees Plaintiffs' first and second requests for production as nothing more than attempts to leverage convenient parameters for identifying documents in Defendants' possession that have already been produced.
The first record release must also contain two internal DHS directives that set the stage for the policy of armed agents at polling places, which is referred to as the "Unlawful Voter Initiative."
The later production demand concerns "documents sufficient to show any assessment, analysis, or determination regarding actual or anticipated threats relating to or during" the midterm elections that involve "any polling place, vote center, early-voting site, ballot drop box, election office, or other location at which ballots are cast, collected, processed, tabulated, canvassed, or certified."
At the same time, AliKhan rejected one discovery request related to the collection of voter data, reasoning that such information "will not reveal much, if anything, about the presence of federal law enforcement at polling locations between now and Election Day."
Finally, the court rejected the plaintiffs' bid for expedited interrogatories because they "seem to request legal conclusions."
The judge also ordered the parties to prepare a joint status report after the discovery materials are released. That report is due Oct. 29.