A Ninth Circuit panel rejected the Justice Department's emergency bid to segregate roughly 20,000 California mail ballots from suspected noncitizens, sending the case back to district court.

In a 2-1 order on Monday, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused the Trump administration's request for an immediate order forcing California to set aside mail-in ballots tied to a list of people the Justice Department says are likely noncitizens. The majority held the appeals court lacks jurisdiction at this stage and returned the fight to the district court, where a hearing was set for Tuesday afternoon.

The ruling lands days before a midterm election in which California was already processing mail ballots by the hundreds of thousands. It leaves unresolved the core dispute: whether the state must act on a roster of roughly 20,000 alleged noncitizens the administration says received ballots, and whether federal courts will force that review in time.

ABC News reported that the Justice Department filed suit earlier this month accusing California of failing to review the list ahead of the election. After California disclosed how many ballots were already moving, DOJ attorney Matthew Donnelly pressed the appeals court for emergency relief rather than wait.

Judges say the emergency was partly self-made

Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez formed the majority. Bennett, appointed by President Donald Trump, and Sanchez, appointed by President Joe Biden, joined in writing that the claimed crisis was not entirely beyond the government's control.

The majority said the United States helped create the timeline problem it then asked the appeals court to fix. Their written order put the point bluntly.

"The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one. At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief."

Breitbart noted the same majority finding that the emergency was at least partly self-constructed because of the government's own filing and process delays. Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay, also a Trump appointee, dissented. The order did not detail his written reasoning.

Bennett pressed jurisdiction hard during a rare Sunday emergency hearing. He told Donnelly he did not see how the appeals court could act yet.

"I don't see how we have jurisdiction."

That skepticism carried into the Monday order. The Washington Examiner reported the panel found it lacked jurisdiction because the Department of Justice had not given the district court adequate time to consider its request, rendering the emergency motion moot.

Bennett flags the Elections Clause and dual bans on noncitizen voting

Bennett also raised a constitutional and statutory clash the DOJ must still answer in the lower court. He questioned how a federal criminal ban on noncitizen voting could override state control of election mechanics when both Congress and California already outlaw noncitizen voting.

"How can the legislature making laws with regard to the manner of holding elections be preempted by a criminal statute passed by the Congress, especially when both the Congress and the California Legislature have made it illegal for non-citizens to vote?"

The Constitution’s Elections Clause gives states primary authority over the manner of holding elections. The Justice Department’s position is that California’s refusal to act on the list still blocks federal enforcement of the ban on voting by illegal immigrants. Those arguments now return to the district judge rather than getting an immediate appellate order.

The administration has faced a string of lower-court fights over immigration and election rules, including cases where it sought higher-court relief after an appeals court blocked a deportation policy. This California ballot fight follows the same pattern of emergency requests under tight election calendars.

Los Angeles sample undercuts a clean noncitizen roster

Los Angeles officials, in court papers filed earlier last week, offered a preliminary look at 200 names from the roughly 20,000-person list. Their filing did not clear the full roster. It did show problems with treating every name as a proven noncitizen voter.

Nearly 40 percent of those 200 records “indicate that they were born in the United States, which is strong evidence of citizenship,” the filing said. Another 71.2 percent of the records had no voting history at all. Officials described a “high percentage” of people who say they were born in the U.S., plus many more with no ballot history.

A 200-name sample is a thin cut of a 20,000-person list. Birthplace claims and blank voting histories do not finish the citizenship check the Justice Department wants. They do show why California is resisting a blanket segregation order without more review, and why the administration still wants that review done before those ballots are counted.

Just The News reported the 2-1 panel said it lacked jurisdiction, granted a motion by the top Los Angeles County election official to reject the department’s emergency path, and faulted DOJ for waiting until weeks before the midterms while ballots were already being processed.

District court is next, with ballots already moving

Donnelly told the panel the department sought appeals-court relief after California disclosed that mail-in ballots were already being processed in numbers reaching the hundreds of thousands. The majority answered that California law governs issuance and processing, that the state runs elections at massive scale, and that the United States waited too long to define the exact relief it wanted.

None of that settles whether illegal immigrants are on the rolls or whether any of the flagged ballots are unlawful. Federal law and California law both ban noncitizen voting. The open fight is over list quality, timing, and who must act before Election Day.

Similar emergency election fights have already pushed the administration toward the Supreme Court, including a recent push when the Trump administration made another emergency appeal over mail-in ballot restrictions after a federal judge blocked its rules. The California case is still one level down.

Tuesday’s district hearing is the immediate next step. The appeals court will not short-circuit that process. If the district judge denies temporary relief, the Justice Department can try again on a fuller record, or lose the chance to segregate those ballots before they are mixed into the count.

Other Trump administration courtroom battles this cycle have followed the same climb from district court to emergency appellate requests, whether over ending TPS protections after a federal judge cleared the path or other immigration enforcement fights. Election mechanics move faster than ordinary civil dockets, which is why DOJ called the California delay an emergency in the first place.

The procedural holding is narrow. The policy stakes are not. A state with millions of registered voters is processing mail ballots on a large scale while a federal list of roughly 20,000 suspected noncitizens sits in litigation. Congress and Sacramento both say noncitizens may not vote. The courts have so far declined to force an immediate segregation order on the timetable the Justice Department demanded.

Lawful elections require citizenship checks with enough time to matter. When a state resists the review and a court sends the dispute back down the ladder, the ballots do not wait.