A Biden-appointed Miami judge dismissed charges against a noncitizen voter and struck down the federal ban on noncitizen ballots, drawing fire from Trump officials.
U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz threw out the federal prosecution of Chelsea Michelle Ann Cox after she cast a ballot in Broward County during the 2020 election while not a U.S. citizen. In a 31-page opinion, the Miami judge held that Congress lacked authority to pass the 1996 criminal ban on noncitizen voting in federal elections.
The ruling lands squarely on election integrity. A law that for nearly three decades made it a federal crime for noncitizens to vote has now been declared beyond Congress’s power by a judge put on the bench in 2024. Trump administration officials moved quickly to condemn the decision.
Breitbart News reported that Leibowitz concluded the Constitution leaves voter eligibility to the states. He wrote that the federal statute violates Article I, Article II, and the 17th Amendment. Because the prosecution rested on a law he found Congress never had power to enact, the case against Cox could not continue.
"When you’re prosecuted based on a law that Congress did not have the authority to pass, the prosecution cannot stand,"
Leibowitz stated in the opinion.
Fox News reported that Leibowitz sits on the Southern District of Florida and was nominated by President Joe Biden in 2024. The Senate confirmed him 64-33 in a bipartisan vote that included then-Sen. Marco Rubio. Cox is identified as a Jamaican noncitizen. The judge found a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 unconstitutional as applied to her case.
In the opinion, Leibowitz put the constitutional claim in plain terms.
"The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections,"
he wrote.
Federal prosecutors had argued the opposite. They said Congress’s power over immigration lets it keep noncitizens out of federal elections. They also pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1970 decision in Oregon v. Mitchell, which upheld a federal law lowering the voting age to 18, as proof that Congress can set some voting rules for federal contests. Leibowitz rejected that reading and dismissed the charges.
The 1996 statute, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 611, made noncitizen voting in federal elections a crime punishable by up to a year in prison and fines. For years it stood as a straightforward federal backstop. One district judge has now said that backstop was never valid.
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security under President Trump, blasted the decision on X. He framed the holding as turning a long-settled prohibition into protected conduct.
"A Biden appointed judge in Florida says that federal bans on noncitizen voting are unconstitutional. The thing that never happens is now ‘constitutionally protected activity!'"
Percival wrote.
Sen. Mike Lee also denounced the outcome, writing on X that the ruling will be overturned and accusing activist judges of trying to wipe out laws that bar noncitizens from voting. The backlash fits a wider pattern of conservative alarm over district judges blocking enforcement tools tied to borders and ballots.
Readers tracking similar fights have watched a Biden-appointed judge defy higher-court guidance on immigration status protections in Massachusetts. Different statute, same basic concern: trial judges rewriting national policy from the bench.
Cox’s case began with a concrete allegation. She voted in Broward County in 2020. Prosecutors brought federal charges under the noncitizen voting ban. Leibowitz did not decide the case on disputed facts about her status or her intent. He decided Congress never had the power to create the crime in the first place, so the prosecution ended.
The judge’s theory is structural. Articles I and II and the 17th Amendment describe how electors and senators are chosen and leave the qualifications of voters largely to state law. Leibowitz read those provisions to mean Congress cannot criminalize noncitizen voting in federal elections even when the election chooses federal officers.
Prosecutors answered with the immigration power and with Oregon v. Mitchell. That 1970 case let Congress set 18 as the minimum voting age for federal elections. The government treated it as clear precedent that federal law can adjust who votes for federal offices. Leibowitz held the noncitizen ban went further than the Constitution allows and dismissed the indictment.
Whether the ruling reaches only Cox or aims at the statute more broadly is not fully spelled out in the available accounts. What is clear is the immediate result: a federal noncitizen voting case is gone, and a 1996 criminal prohibition has been declared unconstitutional by a sitting district judge in Florida.
Parallel disputes keep surfacing. An Obama-appointed judge blocked a USPS mail-in voting rule twice in the run-up to the midterms, another example of a single chambers decision shaping election administration. Election rules now routinely end up before judges nominated in the last two Democratic administrations.
The timing adds weight. Leibowitz joined the court in 2024. Within a short span he has produced a lengthy opinion that, if left standing, removes a federal criminal tool used against noncitizen voting. States would remain free to set their own qualifications and enforce them. The federal penalty that backed those rules in national elections would not.
For years both parties treated the ban on noncitizen voting as settled law. Congress wrote it into the 1996 immigration reform package. Prosecutors used it. The statutory text is simple: noncitizens may not vote in elections for federal office, and violations carry prison time and fines. Leibowitz says that text exceeds Congress’s authority.
If the holding spreads, federal cases of this type become harder to bring. Local district attorneys and state election officials would carry more of the load. National campaigns that rely on uniform federal criminal deterrents would lose one. That is the practical stake, independent of the constitutional debate.
High-stakes judicial fights are not limited to voting. A federal appeals court ruled an Albany prosecutor was not lawfully appointed and quashed subpoenas in a major political case, another reminder that appointment and jurisdiction fights can erase enforcement work overnight. Procedure and power questions now decide outcomes as often as the underlying facts.
Open questions remain. The precise docket details beyond the CourtListener path, the full procedural motion that produced the dismissal, and whether the government has already filed an appeal are not settled in the current reporting. The opinion date itself is not clearly fixed in the accounts. What is fixed is the holding: Congress, in this judge’s view, cannot bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Percival’s reaction captured the administration’s view. A practice long treated as unlawful is, under this opinion, beyond the reach of federal criminal law. Lee’s prediction that higher courts will reverse the decision reflects the expectation that the fight will not end in the Southern District of Florida.
Biden’s judicial picks continue to pursue these flashpoints. Separate reporting has examined how Biden privately weighed other sensitive legal moves late in his term, part of a broader record in which personnel and process choices still shape live cases. The Leibowitz opinion is the latest concrete product of that personnel pipeline.
Cox walked away from federal charges. The 1996 ban sits under a constitutional cloud in at least one courtroom. States still control their voter rolls, yet the federal criminal safety net that once backed those rolls has been cut in this case. Election officials and prosecutors now wait to see whether the ruling stays local or becomes a template.
When a single district judge can erase a decades-old federal ban on noncitizen voting, voters are entitled to ask who is writing the election rules, and who answers for the result.
