Main: President Donald Trump walks toward Air Force One on 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).
With the midterm elections less than 30 days away, a federal judge is being asked to compel the Trump administration to release records that could “shed light” on plans for what the NAACP describes as an “unprecedented deployment of federal officials” at polling places.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, the NAACP sued the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, citing an “urgent need” for the agency to disclose information about a reported plan to deploy “1,000 election monitors.”
The organization alleges that the Trump administration is focused on finding evidence to support unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud rather than protecting voters’ access to the ballot.
“The actions of the current Civil Rights Division’s monitors have raised widespread concerns from state officials and voters,” the complaint states. It points to Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon’s description of Justice Department monitors during the state’s primary elections as “aggressive” and “irregular,” arguing that their conduct appeared to go beyond the authority granted by Congress. The filing also cites reports that the DOJ failed to notify or obtain consent from state and local officials.
The court filing also says that one DOJ “election monitor” assigned to Minnesota, David Michael Levin, reportedly pleaded guilty in 2016 to illegally hacking a Florida government election website as part of an effort to promote baseless allegations about election integrity.
The case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who is also overseeing a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Democratic National Committee seeking records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, previously blocked the administration from putting its “modified” voter-verification system into effect. The U.S. Supreme Court has since stayed that order. The DOJ had described her ruling as “indefensible.”
The NAACP is asking 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 argues, the department could “effectively run out the clock on this request[.]”
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Among the requested records are documents identifying the “legal authority, if any,” supporting the deployment of election monitors; final legal advice and analysis; public complaints about the monitors; a comprehensive list of deployment locations; training materials; and the names, employers, departments and job titles of all personnel assigned to monitor elections.
Earlier Monday, Dhillon responded “right on” while 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 evening, Sooknanan directed the DOJ and the NAACP to “meet, confer,” and submit by 5 p.m. Tuesday a proposed schedule for briefing the case. She also ordered the parties to file a statement addressing whether a hearing on the motion is needed and, if so, to provide three possible dates and times.
“Any disagreements should be noted in the Joint Status Report,” the judge wrote.
The post ‘Urgent’ lawsuit aims to force Trump DOJ to reveal ‘plans’ for ‘unprecedented deployment’ of feds at polls with 1 month to go first appeared on Law & Crime.
