Main: President Donald Trump walks to board Air Force One, Monday, Oct. 5, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon). Right inset: DOJ Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (DOJ).
A federal judge has been asked to compel the Trump administration to disclose records that could “shed light” on plans for what the NAACP describes as an anticipated “unprecedented deployment of federal officials” at polling places, with the midterm elections less than 30 days away.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, the NAACP sued the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, arguing that there is an “urgent need for the Defendant to produce and release the records and information” concerning a plan to deploy “1,000 election monitors.”
The organization alleged that the Trump administration is focused on “searching for evidence related to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud” rather than “ensuring access for voters.”
“The actions of the current Civil Rights Division’s monitors have raised widespread concerns from state officials and voters. For example, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon described the Justice Department’s monitors’ behavior during his state’s primary elections as ‘aggressive’ and ‘irregular,’ and that the monitors’ behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was,” the complaint stated. “There have been reported issues, too, of DOJ not providing notice and obtaining consent from state and local officials.”
The court filing also cited the case of David Michael Levin, a DOJ “election monitor” assigned to Minnesota. Levin reportedly pleaded guilty in 2016 to illegally hacking a Florida government election website as part of an effort to advance baseless claims about the “integrity of elections.”
Like a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee seeking records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the NAACP’s case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan.
Sooknanan, who was appointed by Joe Biden, previously issued an order barring the administration from implementing its “modified” voter-verification system. The U.S. Supreme Court has since stayed that order. The Justice Department had called the ruling “indefensible.”
The NAACP asked Sooknanan to act on an “emergency” basis and issue a writ of mandamus requiring the DOJ to “gather the records and produce them in response to the pending FOIA request at issue in this Complaint.” Without court intervention, the lawsuit argued, the department “will effectively run out the clock on this request[.]”
Among the requested records are documents identifying the “legal authority, if any” used by the DOJ to deploy “election monitors”; final legal advice and analysis; public complaints about the monitors; a “comprehensive list of locations of deployment”; training materials; and the “names, employment, department, and job titles of all election monitors deployed.”
Dhillon responded earlier Monday by posting “right on” and sharing a video in which U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the election monitoring at issue is “not unique to this Department of Justice.”
Right on!
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) October 5, 2026
Dhillon has also said that election monitoring is “something that DOJ does.”
On Monday night, Sooknanan directed the DOJ and the NAACP to “meet, confer,” and submit by 5 p.m. Tuesday a proposed briefing schedule. She also ordered the parties to file a statement addressing whether a hearing on the motion is needed and, if so, to provide three proposed dates and times.
“Any disagreements should be noted in the Joint Status Report,” the judge said.
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