Judge blocks Trump's use of revamped immigration database for voter checks
A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped version of an immigration database for checking the accuracy of state voter rolls, dealing a blow to U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to boost the role of the federal government in elections ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Last year, the Department of Homeland Security revamped a system it uses to verify individuals’ citizenship and immigration status to make it easier for state and local officials to use it to make sure voters were U.S. citizens.
In a 75-page decision on Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with voting rights and privacy advocates who argued that the overhaul of the system, known as SAVE, made it less accurate and risked disenfranchising eligible voters.
“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” wrote Sooknanan, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
In a statement, DHS General Counsel James Percival said, “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s (sic) latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!”
Trump’s Republicans are locked in a fierce battle to maintain control of both houses of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections.
In the U.S., federal elections are administered by individual states. Trump and his allies have long asserted that states are not doing enough to prevent voter fraud, even though audits and academic studies have found that it is rare. Trump argues, falsely, that his loss in the 2020 presidential election was due to fraud.
His administration’s efforts to boost the federal government’s control over elections have largely been stymied by the courts.
Three federal judges in separate cases have blocked Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricting the counting of mail ballots.
A March 2026 executive order restricting mail-in voting has also drawn legal challenges. Federal judges have also rejected nine of the lawsuits the administration has brought against 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over their complete voter rolls.
Critics say Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an effort to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.
Last year’s SAVE revamp allowed users to search many records at a time and gave them access to individuals’ Social Security numbers.
Since then, several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists to the database and cancelled the registrations of registered voters flagged as noncitizens.
The advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, including the League of Women Voters, said that has resulted in people who were wrongfully identified as noncitizens being kicked off voter rolls.
Voting-rights advocates argue that SAVE can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have been naturalized and are thus eligible to vote are sometimes labeled as noncitizens.
Sooknanan ruled that the revamp also violated privacy laws restricting the federal government’s disclosure of Social Security numbers and other information.
Trump administration SNAP restrictions on soda, candy blocked
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday blocked the Trump administration from preventing food stamp recipients in five states from using their benefits to buy sugary foods and drinks.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture lacked the authority under federal law to approve state requests to bar recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, from using benefits to buy sugary foods and drinks. She sided with five plaintiffs who argued the restrictions would undermine their access to food.
The USDA has approved “food restriction” waivers in 23 states, allowing them to restrict SNAP participants from using their benefits to buy products such as soda and candy. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have endorsed the waivers as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement.
SNAP, commonly known as the food stamp program, provides monthly benefits to 42 million low-income Americans and is administered by the USDA in partnership with state governments.
“The federal defendants and the states may have a genuine desire to improve the health of SNAP households by encouraging healthy choices at the store, and they can take lawful steps to meet those goals,” Jackson said. “But what they cannot do is violate the law and their own regulations along the way.”
The USDA defended the policy and signaled it would continue pursuing restrictions on the use of SNAP benefits for certain foods.
“The idea that taxpayer funds should not be used to purchase junk food should not be controversial,” a USDA spokesperson said in a statement. “USDA will not be backing down from the fight to Make America Healthy Again, including for families and communities reliant on SNAP.”
The plaintiffs -- who live in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia -- said in their March lawsuit that they or family members rely on the restricted foods to manage health conditions such as diabetes and allergies, or to obtain energy boosts needed to conduct their daily lives.
They asked the court to block the restrictions in their respective states.
“The court’s ruling is a major step in restoring essential food assistance to the millions of families that rely on SNAP nationwide,” said Katharine Deabler-Meadows, an attorney for the plaintiffs at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice.
In Monday’s ruling, Jackson said the USDA could approve waivers only for limited purposes allowed under U.S. law, such as improving the efficiency of the SNAP program.
“Improving the health and diet of SNAP recipients is not included,” Jackson said.
Supreme Court restores conviction in 1979 Etan Patz case
The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated on Monday the 2017 murder conviction of a man in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in New York City, one of the most notorious U.S. missing-child cases.
The justices in a 6-3 ruling granted a request by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to overturn a lower court’s decision that threw out a jury’s verdict that former local delicatessen worker Pedro Hernandez kidnapped and murdered Patz.
The Supreme Court’s 10-page ruling, powered by its conservative majority, was unsigned. The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision.
“Today, the Supreme Court agreed with the findings of multiple lower courts and upheld the trial conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the horrific murder of Etan Patz, which changed a generation of New Yorkers. This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family, and will continue to stand by this important conviction,” Bragg said in a statement.
Patz vanished in 1979 as he walked alone for the first time to a school bus stop in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan, and was never found. The boy became one of the first missing children whose faces would become ubiquitous as emblems printed on the sides of milk cartons to publicize their disappearance in hopes of generating investigative tips.
Police arrested Hernandez in 2012 after getting a tip that he had confessed to the crime at a church group decades earlier. Hernandez then confessed to police that he lured Patz to the basement of the Soho deli where he worked, strangled him and dumped his body in an alley.
Hernandez’s defense attorneys have argued that Hernandez is mentally ill and his confession was coerced by police.
The defense also sought to blame the murder on Jose Ramos, who dated a Patz family babysitter and was long considered the prime suspect. Ramos, who died in March of this year, served a lengthy prison term after being convicted of sexually abusing boys.
Hernandez, now in his mid-60s, was first tried in 2015. That jury was unable to reach a verdict because of a lone holdout juror who had doubts about the defendant’s guilt. At his second trial, Hernandez was found guilty two years later of kidnapping and murdering Patz, and was sentenced to a prison term of 25 years to life.
But the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Hernandez’s conviction in 2025, ruling that the trial judge had incorrectly instructed the jury and thus swayed the verdict against the defendant.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the 2nd Circuit’s action violated a 1996 federal law that places limits on the power of federal courts to grant relief to prisoners convicted in state courts.
Hernandez initially admitted to the crime without being advised of his so-called Miranda rights to avoid self-incrimination and to have an attorney present. Then, after Hernandez was read his rights and had agreed to waive them, he was videotaped twice making statements of confession.
On the second day of deliberations in the 2017 trial, the jury sent a note to Justice Maxwell Wiley, the judge in the case, asking whether jurors must disregard the two videotaped confessions if they concluded that the initial, non-Mirandized one was involuntary.
The judge wrote back: “The answer is, no,” which the 2nd Circuit ruled was improper and “manifestly prejudicial.”
The anniversary of Patz’s disappearance, May 25, is still commemorated as National Missing Children’s Day.
Federal lawsuit over Los Angeles immigration policy dismissed
A California court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against Los Angeles over a city ordinance limiting its cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin rejected the administration’s argument that the city’s policy was unconstitutional. He gave the administration permission to file an amended complaint.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision on Monday.
Los Angeles city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto said in a statement on Monday that the ruling “reinforces the well-established principle that local governments have the authority to decide how to use their personnel and resources.”
The administration’s lawsuit, filed last June, alleged that Los Angeles violated federal law by enacting policies barring city resources from being used to aid immigration enforcement operations or collect information about individuals’ citizenship status. The lawsuit came weeks after Trump deployed troops to quell protests in Los Angeles against deportation operations.
Olguin on Saturday rejected the administration’s argument that the city unconstitutionally tried to regulate the federal government, finding instead that the ordinance “controls the actions of the City’s own agents and agencies.”
The Trump administration has filed several lawsuits challenging similar policies adopted in jurisdictions run by Democrats. Federal judges have dismissed administration lawsuits brought against the cities of Boston and Chicago.
Judge shuts down DOJ immigration probe into Minnesota officials
A U.S. judge found that the Trump administration unlawfully demanded information from several Minnesota officials at the height of its immigration crackdown in the state earlier this year, ruling that the Justice Department had abused the investigative process.
The ruling by Minnesota-based U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz quashed subpoenas to the office of the state’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz and five other local and state offices, according to an order made public on Monday.
It effectively halts a probe by Trump’s Justice Department into whether Democratic officials had impeded immigration enforcement in their public resistance to the deployment of thousands of agents to conduct deportation roundups.
Schiltz, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, wrote that the Justice Department’s legal justification for the investigation was “risible.”
“The Court finds that the dominant purpose of the challenged subpoenas is to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so,” Schiltz wrote. The order issued on June 17 was unsealed on Monday.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the department “takes the unlawful obstruction of federal law enforcement operations extremely seriously and will continue to act in full compliance with the law to investigate these matters.”
The immigration surge led to numerous violent confrontations with residents and activists in the Minneapolis area, including the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in January.
The ruling is the latest to find that the Trump Justice Department conducted a politically motivated investigation aimed more at harassing opponents than examining potential crimes. A judge in Washington, D.C., made a similar finding in halting a probe into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in March.
The Trump Justice Department sought a wide range of information on state and local policies and directives related to federal immigration operations. The subpoena recipients included Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Walz, whom Trump has frequently derided and who served as Democrat Kamala Harris’ vice presidential nominee in 2024.
Walz said in a written statement that the decision was “a victory for the rule of law and our democracy.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat whose office was also subpoenaed, applauded the ruling. In a written statement, he said, “In America, we settle our political differences at the ballot box, and it should disturb every American that Donald Trump is weaponizing the criminal justice system against people he disagrees with.”
The Justice Department issued the subpoenas in January as Trump administration officials accused Walz and other officials of deliberately stoking interference with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the state.
Walz openly encouraged citizens to record video of ICE arrests and lauded protesters opposed to the Trump administration’s crackdown.
DOJ lawyers said the investigation was focused on whether state and local officials had violated laws barring obstructing federal operations and harbored migrants living illegally in the United States.
Recipients challenged the subpoenas in court, arguing they were issued for the improper purpose of retaliating against political opponents and coercing cooperation with the federal government.
Schiltz found that the DOJ put forward little evidence that state and local officials had violated any laws.
“The fact that connections between the information sought in the subpoenas and any possible criminal violation range from extremely weak to nonexistent only adds to the overwhelming evidence that these subpoenas were not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce, and retaliate,” the judge wrote.
Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect.
This story was originally published June 22, 2026 at 1:54 PM.