Top Democrats and allied organizations filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against President Donald Trump and his administration over their attempts to stymie the midterm elections, including by removing voters from state rolls.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., were among the plaintiffs who filed the suit against Trump, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. The 44-page complaint takes aim at recent demands from DHS — notably in Nevada and California — that states review lists compiled by federal officials of alleged noncitizen voters.

As the complaint notes, state officials have disputed the accuracy of those lists.

The lawsuit points to Trump’s Truth Social threat earlier this week threatening that election officials in LA County “will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” if they count the votes of alleged noncitizens. It cites another from U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Aaron Reitz, who said in a social media post on Monday that he would “hunt” and “prosecute” anyone who violates federal election law.

“DOJ’s recent actions confirm that Defendants have settled on a course of intimidating state election officials with threats of criminal prosecution for doing nothing more than adhering to state law and distributing ballots to registered voters,” states the complaint, filed 13 days before the midterms.

The filing alleges the administration’s efforts to wrest control of elections from the states, combined with federal officials’ threats toward local and state officials, violate the Voting Rights Act and constitutional principles that prevent the federal government from forcing states to enact, administer or enforce federal laws.

In addition to Schumer and Jeffries, the plaintiffs include the Democrats’ House and Senate campaign arms, the Democratic Governors Association, the Nevada Democratic Party and Erick Jose Jimenez, a registered California voter who the lawsuit says became a naturalized citizen 20 years ago but fears he could be falsely labeled as a noncitizen and “unlawfully targeted” as a result.

The defendants also include Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has said he would “absolutely” consider taking the issue to the Supreme Court; and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who has said his department will penalize states that do not cooperate with the federal government’s demands. The plaintiffs are asking the court to find the defendants in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act and to block them from continuing those actions.

“None of this is lawful,” the complaint states. “The Executive Branch enjoys no authority to superintend state voter list maintenance, to supplant state determinations of who is qualified to vote, or to dictate who gets a ballot or whose ballot gets segregated — Congress has kept that responsibility with the States, subject only to a narrow civil enforcement power the administration has declined to invoke during its recent efforts.”

The lawsuit represents the latest challenge to the administration’s efforts to compel states to hand over their voter rolls, which federal courts have also unanimously struck down. Democrats and elections experts have said these efforts could undermine trust in the upcoming elections. But federal officials have persisted, including by filing a lawsuit against California election officials last week.

Trump administration officials slammed the allegations included in the latest lawsuit.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said “Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud,“ adding, “The Trump Administration is taking decisive lawful action to protect our elections including prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion.”

DOJ spokesperson Kirsten Pels said “election integrity is a top priority” for the administration, adding, “Every action the Department has taken to protect the integrity of this year’s elections is grounded in the law and being litigated in open court. Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote and that every lawful ballot is counted a requirement of federal law.”

A spokesperson for DHS called the lawsuit “another political stunt by Democrats.”

The case has been assigned to Chief Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg, an Obama appointee who presided over the first lawsuit challenging the deportation and imprisonment of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members. During an emergency hearing in March 2025, Boasberg ordered that no additional flights to El Salvador could take off; Trump subsequently called him a “Radical Left Lunatic.”

Boasberg was also the subject of a judicial misconduct complaint filed by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff in July 2025, based on his alleged comments during a panel conversation at the annual Judicial Conference. According to the complaint, Boasberg predicted that the administration “would ‘disregard rulings of federal courts’ and trigger ‘a constitutional crisis.’” The chief judge of the 6th Circuit, Jeffrey Sutton, dismissed that complaint earlier this year.

Lisa Rubin and Selena Kuznikov contributed to this report.

CORRECTION (Oct. 21, 2026, 10:31 p.m. ET):
A previous version of this article misrepresented a statement from White House spokesperson Lauren Bis. Bis claimed that “Democrats and the media” dismiss concerns about voter fraud, but she did not herself dismiss voter fraud concerns.

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In 2024, Husham Al-Husainy, an Iraqi American imam in Dearborn, Michigan, backed Donald Trump for president. So did many other Arab and Muslim voters in the state, in a coordinated protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. On election night, Al-Husainy recalled, Trump thanked Arab and Muslim Americans for their support.

Now, Al-Husainy said, “there’s no thanking; there’s attacking.”

This year, Al-Husainy is supporting the Senate campaign of a Democrat whom Trump has baselessly branded a “jihadist” and “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood”: Abdul El-Sayed, who would be America’s first Muslim senator if elected in November. Al-Husainy, who described El-Sayed as “peaceful,” told MS NOW that most of the local Muslim voters he knows who backed Trump in 2024 plan to vote for El-Sayed over Republican Mike Rogers.

People think “they changed,” he said of Republicans. “We didn’t.”

Trump won nearly half the vote in Michigan’s majority-Arab precincts in 2024, research suggests, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein siphoned off a sizable share from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. These voters make up a small but significant part of Michigan’s population, with most of the estimated 400,000 of them concentrated in metro Detroit.

But two years later, Arab and Muslim strategists in the state say, Republicans aren’t courting those voters in a high-stakes Senate race; they’re alienating them with Islamophobic attacks — many aimed at El-Sayed.

“They had a huge opportunity actually to cultivate a healthy relationship with the Michigan Muslim community,” Rexhinaldo Nazarko, a Michigan political strategist who works to mobilize Muslim voters, said of the Republicans. “They blew it for sure.”

Trump’s “jihadist” remark came Friday at a rally in Georgia, where he also mocked El-Sayed’s name. On Truth Social, he has repeatedly referred to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” — his middle name. Rogers has falsely stated that El-Sayed “believes that America deserved 9/11” and that he failed to condemn a terrorist attack at a Michigan synagogue earlier this year.

Such broadsides are nothing new for El-Sayed, or for prominent Muslim candidates generally. But coming from a party trying to win votes in a swing state weeks before the midterms, they have puzzled some longtime observers.

“I don’t understand Republicans when they do this — it’s not expanding their base, it’s actually inflaming their existing base,” said James Zogby, a prominent Democrat who leads the Arab American Institute, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Republicans have found common ground with Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan before. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the state but won its Arab American vote. In 2022, some conservative Muslims in Dearborn joined a right-wing push to remove books with LGBTQ themes from school libraries.

“In some ways, the Republicans have seen them as a lost cause, but they are a decisive voting bloc that can swing elections,” Nura Sediqe, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University, said of the state’s Arab and Muslim voters. “With the margins this thin, there was an opportunity to court the business owners and those that have historically voted Republican.”

But local leaders, including Nazarko and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, say Republicans haven’t tried to win over their communities.

“There has been no authentic outreach to the Muslim community because they do not believe that the Muslims should be at the table within the party,” said Hammoud, the city’s first Arab American and Muslim mayor.

He pointed to Trump’s first-term travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, as well as recent comments from Rep. John James, Michigan’s Republican nominee for governor. In a Newsmax interview this summer, James called Shiite Muslims in Dearborn marching to commemorate Ashura, a Muslim holy day, “extremists.” After the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the remarks, James doubled down, calling CAIR “a radical extremist group.”

“This is the language of the candidates that are arising out of this party,” said Hammoud, a Democrat. “They do not view Muslims as human beings, as equals, as folks that they wish to partner with. They love their vote from time to time, but that’s about it.”

Then there are Trump’s own recent moves, which threaten to whittle away whatever goodwill he still has among some Arab and Muslim voters. Last December he called Somali immigrants — most of whom are Muslim — “garbage” and said they should leave the country. This week, Trump endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for re-election — a move that flies in the face of the Michigan voters who backed him over Harris to protest the Biden administration’s support of Israel.

Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, called Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu “a major betrayal of the Arab and Muslim Americans who voted for the president in 2024” in a post on X.

Bahbah, who is based in Arizona, renamed his group Arab Americans for Peace last year after Trump said he would “take over” the Gaza Strip.

“A lot of people tell us that we’ve been fooled, that we’ve been used, that we got him to the presidency and we got nothing in return,” he told MS NOW on Tuesday.

In an interview, Bahbah characterized Trump’s attacks on El-Sayed as “astounding,” “unacceptable” and “crossing red lines.” He said he expects it will affect Arab and Muslim voters both this year and in 2028.

Republicans reject the charge that their attacks on El-Sayed are Islamophobic, or that the party has abandoned Arab and Muslim voters.

“There has been a concentrated effort by our campaign to speak to every single group,” said Abby Ronson, a spokesperson for Rogers, adding that the Republican’s campaign has spoken to Muslim voters who believe El-Sayed is “too extreme for them.” Ronson also said the campaign’s position is that El-Sayed has “dismissed, not disavowed” the Muslim Brotherhood — even though he did so when asked in a viral exchange at a town hall this past weekend.

State Sen. Jim Runestad, who is also chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said Rogers specifically asked the state party not to attack El-Sayed’s faith or mock his name — a request Ronson confirmed.

“It’s very important that the Republican Party be engaged in the Muslim community,” Runestad told MS NOW, though he added that some groups representing those voters are unwilling to even meet with Republican candidates. Asked if that may be due to the rhetoric from Trump and other high-ranking Republicans, he demurred.

“Everyone who knows the president knows he says what he says when the teleprompter’s shut off,” Runestad said.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has called El-Sayed “the most radical Senate candidate in America,” has spent $1.5 million on an ad that describes him as “a real threat to our national security and our values.”

“Abdul El-Sayed and his family’s ties to designated terrorist groups have raised so many red flags that even the mainstream media can no longer ignore them,” Samantha Cantrell, regional press secretary for the NRSC, told MS NOW. “El-Sayed has serious questions to answer, and it should alarm every single Michigander that he continually refuses to do so.”

El-Sayed has confronted the attacks directly. In a recent interview with ABC News, he described the focus on his name and religion as attempts to “distract us from the fact that we can’t afford our gas and we can’t afford our groceries.”

Polling suggests the race is tight. If El-Sayed wins, the question is whether Republicans will change how they engage with the voters who helped make both his victory and Trump’s possible — voters like Al-Husainy.

If Rogers wins, Nazarko said, it would be “a legitimization card for Islamophobia going forward.”

“That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to keep showing up and continuing to push our values and our voices in the electoral space,” he added, “but it’s concerning.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Rexhinaldo Nazarko’s surname.

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