Judge rejects Trump administration request for order to segregate 20,000 California ballots
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A federal judge in California has rejected the Justice Department’s push for an emergency order to have California segregate roughly 20,000 ballots belonging to individuals the Trump administration has claimed are “likely” noncitizens.
“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” U.S. District Judge David Carter wrote in his Wednesday order.
Regarding the DOJ request for the order to require California to set aside the ballots of those it alleges are likely noncitizens, the judge said it would “wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.”
The judge wrote: “This request violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections. If Plaintiff’s last-minute request for relief were granted, either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process. Over 20,000 registered Californians would potentially lose the right that generations of Americans have fought to preserve.”
Earlier this month, the DOJ filed suit against California accusing the state of failing to review a list of alleged noncitizens that the Trump administration claimed were sent mail-in ballots for next month’s midterm election.
In a court hearing earlier this week, Bill Essayli, a controversial Trump-installed leader of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California, argued the administration was simply pushing for the state to be in compliance with federal law barring noncitizens from casting votes.
But state officials and other legal advocates opposing the DOJ lawsuit countered that the litigation violated longstanding Constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections — and could have chaotic consequences for the state in tabulating final vote counts in the weeks ahead.
In court papers filed last week, Los Angeles officials said a preliminary analysis of 200 of the names on the 20,000-person list, included a “high percentage” of individuals who say they were born in the U.S. and many more who have no voting history at all.
Earlier this week, in a 2-1 decision, a federal appeals court panel also rejected a DOJ request for an immediate order demanding California segregate the roughly 20,000 mail-in ballots.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche on ABC’s “This Week.” (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday addressed the Trump administration’s decision to ban three mainstream news outlets from accessing the White House, saying that President Donald Trump had not “denied access” to the organizations and asserting that it is a “privilege … not a right” to be at the White House.
“The president hasn’t denied access. That’s not the right way to describe it. This is — what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news,” Blanche said in an exclusive interview with “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “There’s still obviously litigation going on, but the important thing, Martha, is to know that … being in the White House is a privilege. It’s not a right.”
In the early hours Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order that required the White House to temporarily restore credentials of journalists working for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Kelly said in his ruling that he believed the outlets cleared the “high bar” required to grant a TRO.
Journalists were allowed back onto the White House grounds later Thursday and primary television pool coverage resumed Friday for the final day of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s official state visit. But on Saturday, there was no TV pool coverage for the president’s trip to a football game in Tennessee; CNN was scheduled to be network covering the president that day, but they said their access to Air Force One was blocked.
Blanche said it wasn’t unusual for a news outlet to not be allowed onto the president’s plane.
“The White House routinely decides who can go on Air Force One. This wasn’t a a one-time denial of CNN. There’s all kinds of times when certain reporters are not flying or are flying,” according to Blanche, who added, “it’s not unusual, and as a matter of fact, it’s common every time the president travels that he and his team decide which reporters get to travel with the president.”
Blanche claimed the three news outlets that were subject to the White House ban “refuse to report anything accurately,” which he said presented a “national security problem.”
“When you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies — and so this is just not about the fact that they’re refusing to report accurate news. It’s all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of of our what should be respected media outlets.”
Judge Kelly, however, was skeptical in his TRO ruling that national security was the true reason for the ban.
“For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting,” Kelly wrote.
Hours after announcing the ban on social media, Trump was asked in the Oval Office if there was any “particular reason or particular story” that prompted it.
“No, no. It’s — it’s really just cumulative stories over the last two years. You get sick of it,” the president said.
On “This Week,” Blanche said he wouldn’t “get into what the judge says” because the litigation is ongoing, but added “our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security.”
When Raddatz pressed Blanche to provide specific examples of stories with which the White House has taken issue, Blanche declined to do so.
Artificial intelligence ‘vital to our national security’
On the issue of artificial intelligence, the attorney general echoed the president’s position on the technology, describing it as “so important and vital to our national security interests and to the success of this country that the United States lead in this space.”
Trump has said it’s critical that the U.S. continues to dominate the AI space, citing competition with China specifically.
“Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself,” he posted on social media Monday.
Some AI company leaders are calling for an industry-wide slowdown amid growing concerns about how the rapid pace of development. Multiple incidents of AI agents acting autonomously have come to light in recent months, including instances where AI agents infiltrated outside companies without the agents’ parent companies’ awareness as it happened.
Last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that OpenAI agent “infiltrated” a government public health website earlier this summer. This weekend, OpenAI confirmed that its models interacted with U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, behavior the company discovered amid an ongoing review into its AI agents’ behaviors.
Blanche acknowledged that “there’s going to be adjustments that have to be made” around AI as the industry continues to develop, but he argued the companies themselves already have the ability to “adjust the technology” as needed.
“In the meantime, the answer is not to just try to all of a sudden try to regulate this in a way that will make us second or third place in the world as far as being being the leaders in this space,” Blanche said.
During his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Tuesday, Trump said of AI, “We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice.”
Asked what that meant, Blanche said, “What it means is that we have a ton of laws — criminal laws, civil laws — that are already in place and on the books that allow us to charge individuals, to charge companies in the right circumstances when there’s crimes committed, and so the answer isn’t always more laws, more laws, more laws.”
“When there are crimes committed, we have a lot of tools already, and the federal Title 18 gives us a lot of a lot of ways to go after criminals and bad actors in the AI space and other spaces,” Blanche continued. “So when the president talks about about the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI and [Homeland Security Investigations], they can go and arrest bad actors in this space, that’s what he means, and it’s true, and that’s what we’re doing.”
A sign indicates the store accepts SNAP benefits, April 21, 2026, in Miami. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Major changes are coming on Oct. 1 for the tens of millions of Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for food assistance from the federal government.
In the short term, most families will see a slight bump in their monthly payments to help afford groceries. But in the coming months, households will face stricter eligibility requirements and changes to how the benefits are administered that could ultimately result in far fewer benefits.
An estimated five million Americans — including more than 1 million children — have already lost SNAP assistance over the past year as part of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending law, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Short-term boost in benefits
Every year on Oct. 1, the federal government adjusts its monthly SNAP benefits to account for inflation. These cost-of-living adjustments apply across all states.
For a typical single-person household in one of 48 states (not including Alaska or Hawaii), checks will go from a maximum of $298 to $306 per month. That’s an extra $8 monthly.
For a family of four, checks will go from $994 to $1,023 per month. That’s an extra $29 per month, or $348 per year.
These inflation adjustments are intended to help families keep up with the rising cost of food. Grocery prices are up 2.2% in the past year.
Big funding changes
While these adjustments will help alleviate some cost pressures for current SNAP recipients, a major overhaul to the program is resulting in fewer people receiving benefits.
As part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” states are required to pay for a larger share of SNAP administrative costs while the federal government pays less. Now, states will be required to cover 75% of those administrative costs — a 25% increase. This change takes effect Oct. 1 and will leave states with millions of dollars of additional costs to cover.
Additional cost shifts are also looming for states. Starting in 2027, states with a SNAP recipient error rate above 6% would also be on the hook for funding a portion of SNAP benefits themselves — expected to cost states hundreds of millions of dollars extra per year.
In anticipation of these sweeping changes, some states are already seeing a big drop in SNAP enrollment.
According to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Arizona, Florida and Louisiana were some of the states that saw the biggest change in participation, with Arizona seeing its numbers cut nearly in half.
Changing eligibility requirements
The Republican-backed law has already imposed stricter requirements on SNAP recipients.
Under the law, work requirements apply to able-bodied adults without dependents aged 18 to 64, up from the previous age limit of 54.
The law also changed work requirements for families responsible for a dependent. Now, families with children age 14 and older are no longer eligible for an exemption from those work requirements.
