MIAMI — A federal judge in Miami has struck down a decades-old federal law barring people who are U.S. citizens from voting in federal elections, ruling that Congress overstepped its constitutional authority by imposing a voter qualification that belongs to the states.

The decision comes as the Trump administration has made non-citizen voting a prominent part of its election-integrity agenda and is stepping up prosecutions around the country. On Monday, the Justice Department announced charges against 16 noncitizens accused of illegal voting, fraudulent voter registration, false claims of citizenship and related election crimes.

U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz dismissed the federal prosecution of Chelsea Michelle Ann Cox, a Jamaican national accused of knowingly casting a ballot in Broward County in the 2020 presidential election while she was not a U.S. citizen.

In a sharply worded 31-page opinion, Leibowitz ruled that Section 611, the federal law that makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, is unconstitutional as applied to Cox because the U.S. Constitution generally gives states, not Congress, the power to decide who is eligible to vote.

“The best reading of the actual statute that underpins this criminal case yields an inescapable conclusion,” the judge wrote. The congressional act that bans noncitizens from casting ballots “is a voter qualification statute, and the Constitution does not authorize Congress to legislate voter qualifications for federal elections. Except for very specific constitutional provisions, Congress has no power to say who can vote or who cannot vote in federal elections — that foundational power is reserved for the States, and limits Congress.”

The ruling does not make it legal for noncitizens to vote in Florida, where state law separately prohibits it. Nor did Leibowitz invalidate the federal statute nationwide. He expressly limited his decision to the law as applied to Cox and declined to rule on her broader argument that the law, Section 611, is unconstitutional on its face.

Still, his reasoning, if upheld and followed in other cases, could limit the federal government’s ability to bring similar prosecutions under Section 611 — at the same time the Trump administration is increasingly relying on federal criminal law to target suspected noncitizen voting.

Among the 16 defendants whose charges were announced Monday are two lawful permanent residents prosecuted in the Middle District of Florida. Italian national Andrea Catanese, 60, is accused of voting in the 2024 general election and later falsely telling immigration officials during a naturalization interview that he had never voted in a federal election. Bahamian national Terrance Patrick Evans, 37, is charged with voting as an alien after supposedly casting a ballot in the 2024 federal general election despite knowing he was not a U.S. citizen.

Other cases announced by the Justice Department were filed in Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Some involve the same voting-by-an-alien offense at issue in Cox’s case, while others include separate charges involving voter registration, false claims of citizenship or the naturalization process.

The Justice Department has already appealed Leibowitz’s decision to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A notice of appeal was filed Oct. 2, the day after the case was terminated in Leibowitz’s court.

2020 vote, federal charges

Cox was charged in October 2025 with a single misdemeanor count of voting by an alien. Prosecutors said she voted early in Broward County on Oct. 29, 2020, in an election that included races for president, vice president and the U.S. House.

The offense carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

According to prosecutors, Cox entered the United States from Jamaica as a tourist in 1999 and remained after her visa expired the following year. They said she used a fraudulent U.S. Virgin Islands birth certificate to obtain a Florida driver’s license in 2000 and presented the document again when renewing her license in 2013. Investigators later obtained her Jamaican birth certificate and documentation from the U.S. Virgin Islands indicating there was no record of her birth there.

Prosecutors said Cox submitted a Broward County voter-registration application in August 2012, checked “Yes” when asked whether she was a U.S. citizen and listed her birthplace as the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Government records showed that she had voted in the general elections of 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2020, prosecutors said. By the time the case was brought last year, the statute of limitations had expired on a potential voter-registration charge and on the earlier votes, leaving the 2020 ballot as the basis for the prosecution.

But Leibowitz made clear that his decision did not depend on whether those allegations were true.

“No determination of fact is needed here; one can assume that the Defendant committed every element of the crime established by Section 611, and the answer is the same,” he wrote.

Instead, the case turned on a constitutional question that federal courts have rarely been asked to decide: Does Congress have the power to determine that noncitizens cannot vote in federal elections?

Who gets to decide?

Cox’s attorneys argued that the Constitution draws a distinction between Congress’ authority to regulate how federal elections are conducted and the states’ authority to determine who qualifies to vote.

“The States alone can establish the qualifications of electors for federal elections; Congress can regulate only the time, place, and manner of elections,” they argued in their motion to dismiss the charge.

Their argument relied in part on Article I of the Constitution, which ties eligibility to vote for members of the U.S. House to the qualifications established for voters by each state legislature. The 17th Amendment contains similar language governing elections for U.S. senators.

The defense also cited the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the case Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, which said the Elections Clause empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, “but not who may vote in them.”

The Justice Department countered that Congress has substantial constitutional authority to safeguard federal elections and argued that Supreme Court precedent allows the federal government to establish comprehensive election regulations and impose sanctions to protect their integrity.

A central dispute involved the Supreme Court’s fractured 1970 decision in Oregon v. Mitchell. That case upheld Congress’ authority to lower the voting age to 18 for federal elections but rejected its ability to impose the same requirement on state and local elections.

The Justice Department argued that the decision demonstrated that Congress possesses at least some authority to establish voter qualifications in federal elections.

Leibowitz rejected that interpretation, concluding that no rationale in the Mitchell decision commanded a majority of the Supreme Court and that the case did not control Cox’s challenge.

Instead, he found support in the Constitution’s text and structure, its original understanding and subsequent Supreme Court and appellate decisions for the conclusion that the general authority to establish voter qualifications belongs to the states.

Conservative criticism

The decision has drawn sharp criticism from conservatives as the Trump administration argues that noncitizen voting warrants stronger federal enforcement.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee called the ruling “insane,” predicted it would be overturned and accused “activist judges” of trying to dismantle federal protections against noncitizen voting.

Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative election-law advocate at the Heritage Foundation, called Leibowitz’s opinion “patently wrong,” arguing that Congress’ constitutional authority over naturalization gives the federal government power to exclude noncitizens from participating in federal elections.

Leibowitz was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden, but his confirmation drew significant Republican support. The Senate confirmed him 64-33 in February 2024, with both of Florida’s Republican senators at the time, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, voting in favor. Thirteen Republicans joined Democrats and independents in supporting his confirmation.

Leibowitz also had been recommended for consideration for a South Florida federal judgeship during Trump’s first administration, although Trump never formally nominated him. Biden first nominated Leibowitz in 2023 and renominated him in January 2024 after the initial nomination was returned at the end of the Senate session.

Supreme Court fight?

Daniel Rashbaum, Cox’s defense attorney, said the decision could provide a basis for defendants elsewhere to challenge similar federal voting charges, although he cautioned against overstating its practical reach because Section 611 historically has been used infrequently.

“It’s not a narrow ruling,” Rashbaum said, while stressing that the constitutional division of authority does not prevent states from enforcing their own prohibitions.

“In reality, it makes no difference because the state of Florida and every other state says, ‘If you’re not a U.S. citizen, you can’t vote,’” Rashbaum said. “But that’s a state question, not a federal question.”

The Justice Department’s announcement Monday, however, shows that the once-rarely used federal statute has taken on greater importance under the Trump administration.

Rashbaum also noted that Leibowitz’s reasoning would not necessarily affect federal prosecutions involving other supposed election crimes. In a separate case he handled, for example, a defendant faced four felony voter-registration counts in addition to the misdemeanor Section 611 charge. The constitutional challenge to Section 611 would have affected only the voting count.

The same distinction applies to the latest Justice Department cases. Some defendants face additional allegations involving false claims of citizenship or fraudulent statements that rest on separate federal statutes.

When interviewed before the government’s appeal was filed, Rashbaum said he was certain the Justice Department would challenge Leibowitz’s decision and predicted the central question before the 11th Circuit would be whether Oregon v. Mitchell gives Congress the constitutional authority necessary to enact Section 611.

“I would predict this case goes all the way to the Supreme Court,” Rashbaum said. “And I would predict that the Supreme Court agrees with Judge Leibowitz.”

Leibowitz acknowledged at the outset of his opinion how little precedent exists on the question. He noted that only a handful of federal district courts had recently confronted similar challenges, including three other cases filed in South Florida in 2026 and two in Wisconsin.

The 11th Circuit appeals court previously upheld Section 611 in a 2007 case, United States v. Knight, but that challenge involved due process under the Fifth Amendment, not whether Congress possessed the constitutional authority to enact the law in the first place.

Leibowitz ultimately framed the dispute not around whether noncitizens should vote, but around which level of government the Constitution empowers to decide who may participate in federal elections.

“An unconstitutional law is void, and is as no law,” he wrote, quoting an 1879 Supreme Court decision. “An offence created by it is not a crime.”

That protection, he wrote, “acts as a shield for every person facing criminal prosecution in the United States, citizen and non-citizen alike.... Chelsea Cox cannot be prosecuted for an alleged violation of an unconstitutional statute.”

©2026 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.