A Biden-appointed Miami judge has struck down a long-standing federal law that makes noncitizen voting a crime, undercutting the Trump Justice Department’s election-integrity drive ahead of the midterms.
U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz dismissed the federal case against Florida resident Chelsea Cox, a Jamaican national charged with illegally voting in the 2020 election, after finding the 1996 statute criminalizing noncitizen voting unconstitutional.
The New York Post reported that the Thursday ruling appears to be the first time a federal court has held that the law known as “voting by an alien” violates the U.S. Constitution. The decision applies only to Cox’s case and does not bind other judges, though it lands as a clear setback for federal prosecutors.
Leibowitz, nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, wrote that under the Constitution only the states, not Congress, can set voter qualifications. Every state already requires U.S. citizenship to vote. In his view, it was up to Florida, not the Department of Justice, to prosecute her for breaking that rule.
Government court filings laid out how Cox got on the rolls in the first place. She entered the United States as a tourist in 1999 and stayed after her visa expired the next year. She then used a fraudulent U.S. Virgin Islands birth certificate to obtain a Florida driver’s license and used those documents to register to vote in 2012.
Records show she voted in federal elections from 2012 through 2020. Only the 2020 ballot fell inside the statute of limitations, so that is the vote federal prosecutors charged in October 2025.
Illegal voting is grounds for deportation. The Trump administration has investigated noncitizen voting and, in some cases, moved to remove defendants even years after criminal cases closed. Cox’s attorney, Bruce Udolf, welcomed the dismissal and said he hoped the government would not seek her removal, citing her declining health.
Udolf told reporters the case called for restraint.
"This is a situation that cries out for discretion by government officials, and they’d be well-advised to walk away from this without further reprisal against her,"
Leibowitz did not claim noncitizen voting is legal under state law. He underscored the opposite.
"Can the State of Florida prohibit and punish the exact conduct Defendant Cox allegedly engaged in here? This has already been decided elsewhere and is not addressed here: Florida can and does,"
Federal prosecutors had argued the opposite division of labor. In a court filing, the Justice Department said Congress, not the states, is best equipped to handle immigration and foreign affairs, and that foreign interference in elections falls within Congress’s reach.
"Foreign interference in elections is clearly within the purview of Congress,"
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment on the ruling.
The Cox case sits inside a broader enforcement push. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, the Justice Department has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting. About 45 such cases remain pending around the country. At least four other defendants have already challenged the same 1996 law on similar grounds.
That drive matches earlier DOJ warnings to election officials in all 50 states that allowing noncitizen voting can bring criminal exposure. The administration has treated citizenship checks as basic election security, not optional paperwork.
A July Reuters investigation found Cox was one of just 129 people charged under the “voting by an alien” statute in the period it reviewed. The same reporting said no defendant in that set was accused of conspiring to sway an election, backing a candidate, or taking payment for a vote. Most of those charged were lawful permanent residents who registered by mistake or after bad advice from an election worker or government clerk, the investigation said.
Even so, federal grand juries and prosecutors have kept moving. Separate cases have produced indictments of foreign nationals for illegal voting and multi-state charging packages aimed at alleged election crimes. The constitutional ruling in Miami does not erase those files; it does give defense lawyers a new template to copy.
The administration has framed stricter citizenship enforcement as a cornerstone of its effort to highlight election fraud risks before November’s midterm elections, with Republicans fighting to keep majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump has said documented citizenship requirements are needed for election integrity and has portrayed noncitizen voting as a threat that dilutes lawful ballots.
On July 16 he said 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Five days later, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said about 400 noncitizens in her state had voted after a software error mistakenly registered roughly 6,600 people in 2023-24. The Justice Department then demanded names, nationalities, and addresses tied to that New Jersey episode.
Those fights track the same theme as administration claims about noncitizens on voter rolls as the midterm contest intensifies. Clean rolls and citizen-only ballots are not abstract theory to voters who expect the law to mean what it says.
Federal prosecutors have also rolled out wider charging actions, including a package that charged 16 people across seven states over alleged illegal voting and related election crimes. One district-court opinion in Florida does not rewrite those statutes nationwide, but it does create a road map for more challenges.
Leibowitz’s order leaves the practical question hanging. If only states may set and enforce voter qualifications, what happens to the federal tool Congress wrote in 1996 to police noncitizen ballots in federal elections? Prosecutors say foreign interference and immigration policy belong in federal hands. The judge said the Constitution assigns voter qualifications to the states, and Florida already bans the conduct.
The ruling is not binding elsewhere. Other judges may find the reasoning persuasive, or they may not. About 45 pending noncitizen-voting cases will test that divide soon enough. The DOJ Civil Rights Division’s election-integrity campaign, monitors, lawsuits, and criminal warnings ahead of the 2026 midterms, continues in the meantime.
Cox’s file is closed on the federal criminal charge. Her immigration future remains an open question the government has not publicly answered. States still require citizenship. The federal statute, in this courtroom, does not.
Lawful elections rest on a simple line: citizens vote, noncitizens do not. When a single judge narrows the federal power to police that line, voters are entitled to ask who benefits from the gap, and who will close it.
