Miami federal judge strikes down ban on noncitizen voting as unconstitutional

A federal judge in Miami has declared unconstitutional the decades-old U.S. law that makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, dismissing a case against a Jamaican woman in what appears to be the first ruling of its kind — and a direct complication for one of the Trump Justice Department's signature prosecution campaigns heading into the midterms.

U.S. District Judge David S. Leibowitz, sitting in the Southern District of Florida, dismissed the case Thursday against Chelsea Cox, a longtime Florida resident originally from Jamaica, who had been charged with casting an illegal ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Leibowitz found that the 1996 statute Congress used to charge her, which bars any "alien" from voting for president, vice president or members of Congress, reaches beyond the federal government's constitutional authority because the power to set voter qualifications belongs to the states alone.

It is, by multiple accounts, the first time a federal court has struck down the law. The ruling binds no one outside Cox's own case, and the Justice Department has already moved to appeal. But it lands squarely in the middle of a prosecution push the administration has built into a marquee element of its election-integrity agenda, and it hands defense lawyers in dozens of similar cases around the country a rare judicial opening.

A rarely used law, newly weaponized

The statute at issue, 18 U.S.C. § 611, has existed since 1996 and was, for most of its life, enforced only sporadically; the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland brought roughly a dozen such cases over four years. That changed after President Trump returned to office in January 2025. Prosecutors have since charged approximately 60 people nationwide with noncitizen voting offenses, with about 45 of those cases still pending, according to reporting on the Cox ruling.

The push has run alongside a broader Justice Department campaign targeting state election administration. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon's Civil Rights Division sent letters this year to election officials in all 50 states warning that they could face criminal liability for knowingly keeping noncitizens on the rolls, and the department has gone to court against dozens of states and the District of Columbia that it says failed to turn over complete voter registration lists for review ahead of November's elections.

Leibowitz's ruling does not touch that separate records fight. But it strikes at the legal foundation of the criminal cases DOJ has been bringing to make an example of noncitizen voting — cases the administration has repeatedly cited as evidence of the fraud it says justifies tighter voter-list scrutiny.

"The best hand it can play"

Leibowitz, who was nominated by President Biden and confirmed to the bench in 2024, did not reach his conclusion quickly. Earlier this year he took the unusual step of asking an outside expert, Paul Clement — a former U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush — to analyze the statute's constitutionality. Clement's 43-page report concluded that Congress likely lacked the power to enact the law, though he cautioned the question was "not entirely clear-cut."

In his own opinion, Leibowitz leaned on the structure of the Constitution itself, writing that "the text, structure, and original public meaning of the Constitution show that Congress does not have the constitutional power to enact this statute." Florida already bars noncitizens from voting under its own law, he noted, which made federal prosecution both unnecessary and, in his view, an intrusion on power the Constitution reserves to the states. He was openly skeptical of the government's defense of the statute.

"So why does the Government lead with such a weak hand? Because it's the best hand it can play."

Prosecutors had countered that Congress has clear constitutional authority over matters of immigration and foreign affairs, and that policing foreign interference in federal elections falls within that power — not the states' power over ballot administration. Leibowitz was not persuaded.

A split within the same courthouse

The ruling did not arrive in a vacuum, and it is far from the last word. Fewer than four weeks earlier, a colleague on the same Miami federal bench, Judge Jacqueline Becerra, rejected an identical constitutional argument from a Haitian defendant, Wilner Renaud, and let his prosecution proceed. At least four other defendants in pending noncitizen-voting cases around the country have raised the same challenge Cox did, with rulings expected in some of those cases within days.

Cox's own case illustrates how these prosecutions typically arise. She entered the United States on a tourist visa in 1999, overstayed it, and later obtained a fraudulent U.S. Virgin Islands birth certificate that she used to register to vote; she cast ballots from 2012 through 2020 before being charged last October. Her attorney, Bruce Udolf, said he hoped the government would not pursue her removal from the country given her declining health, now that the underlying charge has been thrown out. Weeks earlier, in a separate case, federal prosecutors in South Florida had secured a guilty plea from another Miami-Dade voter under the same statute — a reminder that, for now, the law remains very much in active use elsewhere.

What happens next

The Justice Department has not commented publicly beyond confirming it is appealing, a step that will send the question to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same appellate court that covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama. Until an appeals court or the Supreme Court weighs in, Leibowitz's decision binds no judge outside his own courtroom, and prosecutors can continue pursuing the roughly 45 pending cases elsewhere in the country on the theory that the law is valid.

That leaves the other defendants who have raised the same argument — including the four cases cited alongside Cox's — waiting to see whether their own judges follow Leibowitz's reasoning or Becerra's. A wire-service account of the ruling noted that at least one more decision was expected within days. However those rulings land, the underlying legal question — whether Washington or the states get the final say over who may cast a federal ballot — is now almost certain to work its way toward a higher court before the Trump administration's noncitizen-voting initiative runs its course heading into November's midterms.