Fighting for Election Integrity

Judicial Watch Pursues Fair Elections
States Sue to Get Billions of Taxpayer Dollars
Trump is Ridding Our Streets of Illegal Alien Child Sex Offenders

Judicial Watch Pursues Fair Elections

In January, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed with us that Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors had standing to challenge an Illinois law that allowed the counting of ballots up to two weeks after election day.

Now with midterm elections looming and controversy over the conduct of the redistricting election in Virginia, we are anticipating victory in our latest case for one election day. Our chief investigative reporter, Micah Morrison, recounts in Investigative Bulletin our significant accomplishments in court.

Judicial Watch was at the Supreme Court on Monday, March 23, fighting for a critical legal determination: Election Day is a day—not five days, not a week, not a month.

After filing the brief in February Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “This is the most important Supreme Court election integrity case in a generation. The pandemic spread of states counting late ballots received after Election Day is a flagrant violation of long-standing federal law that not only encourages voter fraud but also severely undermines public confidence in our elections. The Supreme Court now has a critical opportunity to restore a fundamental guardrail to the election process.”

More than fifteen states allow late-arriving ballots to be counted. Judicial Watch asked the Supreme Court to uphold a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which struck down as unconstitutional a Mississippi law allowing election officials up to five days to count mail-in ballots received after Election Day. Mississippi appealed, arguing that late-arriving, postmarked ballots were permissible.

The original JW lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, was later consolidated with a similar challenge by the Republican National Committee and others. At the court on Monday, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement made the historic opening statement on behalf of Judicial Watch’s Libertarian Party client. “All agree that elections for federal office have to end on the day of the election specified by Congress,” Clement said. “Nonetheless, Mississippi insists ballots can trickle in days or even weeks after Election Day.”

JW’s brief to the Supreme Court makes the case for a single Election Day. There is no historic foundation for counting ballots arriving after Election Day, JW notes. The opportunities for fraud are endless, and public confidence in elections is eroded.

“The whole point of the federal Election-Day statutes is to set a single uniform day for the election,” the brief notes. “Allowing ballots to trickle in days or weeks after Election Day is antithetical to that basic goal.”

Congress set an Election Day, not an Election Week or an Election Month. “Through the federal Election-Day statutes, Congress exercised its constitutional authority to set a uniform time for federal elections to occur. Text, historical practice, precedent, and common sense all demonstrate that those statutes set the deadline by which ballots must be submitted and received. Simply put, the ballot box closes on Election Day, and ballots that are not received until days or weeks after the date specified by Congress arrive after Election Day and should not be counted.”

It’s been a busy year for Judicial Watch at the Supreme Court. In January, the court granted standing in a historic case JW filed on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors. The case challenges an Illinois law allowing the counting of ballots received up to fourteen days after the election.

The Judicial Watch election integrity team is led by Senior Attorney Robert Popper, who previously served in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. JW attorneys T. Russell Nobile and Eric Lee provide critical support for JW’s many landmark legal efforts.

Tom Fitton reported from outside the Supreme Court after the March 23 hearing. The Judicial Watch team had made “historic legal arguments to preserve the idea of Election Day,” he said. Court observers were largely in agreement that a majority of the justices appeared poised to curb late-arriving ballots—though predicting what the Supreme Court will do is a fool’s errand. Some election officials are not waiting. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that election administrators in some states had already begun “planning for a world where all ballots must arrive by Election Day.”

A decision is expected in June.

It is well worth noting that six million inactive names have been removed from voter rolls nationwide due to our efforts. Recently, in Colorado alone, 372,000 ineligible voter names have been removed from its voter registration lists following a settlement addressing the state’s compliance with federal voter list maintenance requirements. This is a major victory for election integrity.

States Sue to Get Billions of Taxpayer Dollars

As President Trump launches a sweeping crackdown on fraud, waste, and abuse in federal benefit programs, those who benefited from years of lax rules and easy taxpayer dollars are fighting back hard. Our Corruption Chronicles blog reports on the new Task Force to Eliminate Fraud — led by Vice President JD Vance — and the fierce resistance from the Left.

Twenty Democrat-run states and the District of Columbia are suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over a new policy that prohibits all grant recipients from using taxpayer funds to promote gender ideology, benefit illegal immigrants or on programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities or permit male competitive participation in women’s sports. In late December the federal agency that annually disburses tens of billions of dollars in food assistance announced the antidiscrimination rule forcing states to certify compliance with the new regulations before receiving money for costly welfare programs such food stamps, free school lunch and a special program for low-income women known as Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and their kids under the age of five. The states suing over the new requirements receive over $74 billion annually from the USDA and they want their federal funds while still supporting the biased leftist policies of the previous administration.

The new Trump administration policy is unconstitutional, according to their lawsuit, which alleges that the conditions are vague, arbitrary, coercive and unrelated to the federal interest. The complaint also accuses the USDA of exceeding its legal authority and imposing the measure without following required legal procedure. The agency has “thrown unconstitutional and unlawful roadblocks between the programs created by Congress and the States that rely on them, threatening critical nutrition support, vital agricultural research, and the safety of our national food chain and communities,” according to the complaint, which also accuses the USDA of imposing extraneous and unreasoned conditions on all programs, grants and cooperative agreements. The lawsuit further alleges that the spending clause of the U.S. Constitution requires that “funding condition be communicated with sufficient clarity that it can be accepted knowingly and voluntarily, and it prohibits coercive conditions that place a gun to the head of recipients that cannot forgo critical funding.” The “ambiguous, coercive conditions” advanced by the USDA “undermine the status of the States as independent sovereigns in our federal system,” the complaint states.

Among the officials suing the USDA is New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was federally indicted last year with bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. She says millions of New Yorkers depend on government assistance to put food on the table and their benefits could be threatened or delayed. “The federal government cannot hold critical funding hostage to force states to comply with vague, ideological directives,” James said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. The other states suing are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, who has previously filed five lawsuits “challenging unlawful grant conditions imposed by the Trump Administration” confidently asserts that the president cannot make “cruel funding restrictions” that, she says in this case will result in people going hungry. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong says the administration’s immigration, diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity policies are unrelated to the purpose of USDA funding. “Trump’s message to Connecticut—fall in line with extreme MAGA ideology, or your families go hungry,” Tong said. “Trump wants states to sign hateful pledges that have absolutely nothing to do with food assistance.”

The updated USDA funding policy is part of broader initiatives launched by President Trump early last year to defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the federal government and end the taxpayer subsidization of open borders. Under the first measure the federal government will “defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” according to a presidential order. The second aims to prevent taxpayer resources from acting as a magnet and fueling illegal immigration to the United States by ensuring that no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens. States only need to comply with the new rules to receive their billions in USDA funds.

Trump is Ridding Our Streets of Illegal Alien Child Sex Offenders

Criminal illegal aliens make headlines almost daily for their crimes against Americans. Thankfully, the Trump administration has ended the previous policy of accommodating sanctuary jurisdictions that shield these offenders from federal immigration enforcement. As a result, our children are safer now. Our Corruption Chronicles blog reports the details.

In yet another noteworthy immigration enforcement accomplishment ignored by establishment media, the Trump administration nearly doubled the number of illegal alien child sex offenders arrested during Biden’s last year in a U.S. city known to be a cesspool of undocumented criminals. In Trump’s first year back in the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) apprehended 414 criminal alien child predators in Houston, Texas compared to just 211 under the last administration’s final year in office. The recently arrested criminal aliens accounted for 761 child sex offenses and 525 other serious crimes ranging from homicide to robbery, according to an announcement issued this week by ICE, the 20,000-employee Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency created after 9/11 to enforce immigration laws and preserve national security.

The latest roundup of child predators comes on the heels of two separate operations in Houston less than a year ago in which more than 1,000 dangerous criminal aliens were apprehended in the area, which is estimated to be home to more than half a million illegal immigrants. In the first effort ICE arrested over 350 gang members with 1,700 criminal convictions who entered the U.S. illegally more than 1,400 times. Most belonged to violent gangs, including the renowned Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Tren de Aragua, Latin Kings,15th Street Gang, Sureños, Paisas and Tango Blast and were convicted of serious crimes including homicide, sexual assault of a child, drug and sex trafficking and unlawful possession of a firearm. A few weeks later, in a separate Houston crackdown, federal authorities nabbed another 822 illegal immigrant offenders with convictions for murder, sexual assault, domestic violence and driving while intoxicated among other crimes. The figures spoke loudly about the Biden administration’s catastrophic open border policies that welcomed a record-breaking 7.6 million illegal aliens, including hundreds of thousands with serious criminal records and more than 1.7 million from countries that DHS determined pose a national security threat to the U.S.

There has been incredible progress in a little over a year under this administration despite serious resistance from local sanctuary governments that protect illegal immigrants, an increasingly powerful leftist movement, and its allies in the mainstream media. “While elected officials and media pundits across the country were zealously trying to manipulate the American public with fake news stories about ICE’s public safety mission, the brave men and women of ICE were quietly going about their business to arrest and remove more than 400 dangerous child predators from our local communities,” said the director of ICE’s Houston field office, Gabriel Martinez, this week. “Thanks to their tireless efforts, parents across Southeast Texas can sleep a little better tonight knowing that these pedophiles and child rapists are no longer a threat to their children.” The ICE Houston field office is responsible for immigration enforcement operations in 58 southeastern Texas counties situated in the state’s gulf coast from Beaumont to Corpus Christi and the Houston/Galveston area out to Waco. The busy ICE office reveals that this operation was a team effort assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Among the child sex offenders rounded up in Houston in the last year are Alex Samuel Lara Diaz, a 35-year-old previously deported Honduran wanted in his native country for homicide and convicted in the U.S. of aggravated sexual assault of a minor. Gabriel Julio Lopez-Velazquez, a 25-year-old Mexican who entered the U.S. illegally four times has been convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a minor, aggravated assault, and illegal entry and twice for felony illegal reentry. Another Mexican, 48-year-old Juan Leonardo Garcia Ibarra, illegally entered the U.S. a dozen times and has been convicted of sexual indecency with a child, aggravated assault, cruelty toward a child and driving under the influence. Milton Alexander Magana Fuentes, a 32-year-old from El Salvador, entered the U.S. illegally four times and has been convicted of sexual indecency with a minor and failure to register as a sex offender. Luis Mario Monsalve Chaux, a 52-year-old Colombian, has convictions for possession of child sexual abuse material, four burglaries, and twice for larceny. The list is extensive and includes mug shots of the perpetrators.

Until next week,