A Biden-appointed federal judge in the Southern District of Florida dismissed criminal charges against a Jamaican national who voted in the 2020 presidential election, holding that a key federal ban on noncitizen voting could not be applied to her under the Constitution.
Fox News Digital reported that U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz issued the 31-page ruling on a Thursday and threw out the federal case against Chelsea Cox. Cox is originally from Jamaica and is not a U.S. citizen. She still cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential race.
The decision targets a criminal provision in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. That statute makes it a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Leibowitz ruled the government’s application of the law unconstitutional as applied to Cox. Conservative critics immediately branded him an “activist judge,” and election-integrity advocates said the ruling will not stand.
The stakes are plain. Federal prosecutors lost a vehicle to punish noncitizen voting in this case. States retain their own charging power. Congress faces fresh questions about how far it can go to protect federal elections from ballots cast by people who are not citizens.
Leibowitz wrote that voter qualifications in federal elections belong to the states.
"The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections."
He added a second line from the same opinion.
"This is clear from both the text of the document and the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787."
The judge rejected the government’s core theories. Prosecutors leaned on Congress’s broad power over immigration and noncitizens. Leibowitz answered that the power is real but is not “a series of blank checks” that erase “foundational constitutional constraints.” He also rejected reliance on the Elections Clause. In his view the 1996 provision did not regulate election procedures or police fraud. It created a federal voter qualification, which he said the Constitution does not give Congress.
The ruling ends the federal prosecution of Cox. Florida still has authority to bring state charges if it chooses. Public reporting has not confirmed whether state prosecutors have filed any such case.
Cox is a woman originally from Jamaica. She voted in the 2020 presidential election even though she was not a U.S. citizen. Federal authorities charged her under the IIRIRA noncitizen-voting provision. Leibowitz’s order dismissed those federal charges after the constitutional analysis described above.
The Trump administration has intensified efforts to stop noncitizens from voting. Those efforts include federal prosecutions and attempts to verify citizenship on state voter rolls. The work has produced legal fights with Democratic-led states and voting-rights groups. The Cox dismissal is one of the sharpest judicial setbacks those efforts have hit so far in open court.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, co-author of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, posted a blunt response on X.
"This insane ruling will certainly be overturned. But it gives the game away: Democrats pretend we don’t need the SAVE Act because non-citizen voting is already illegal... while activist judges try to destroy laws banning non-citizens from voting!"
Lee’s SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship for voter registration in federal elections. The bill is stalled in the Senate and is viewed as unlikely to pass before the midterms. A related caption tied to Lee’s comments noted a Reuters report that more than 30,000 noncitizens had been discovered on U.S. voter rolls.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with Advancing American Freedom, told Fox News Digital the opinion is wrong on the law.
"Judge David Leibowitz’s opinion that the federal law barring aliens from voting is unconstitutional is patently wrong."
He continued that states do set qualifications for citizen voters, yet Article I, Section 8 gives Congress full authority over naturalization. That power, he said, lets the federal government ban aliens from voting or otherwise taking part in the democratic process. Spakovsky predicted the 11th Circuit would most likely “squash” the ruling.
Anhishek Kambil, a partner at Holtzman Vogel Law Firm, said he would be “surprised” if the federal government did not prevail on appeal. He pointed to Supreme Court precedent, including Oregon v. Mitchell, in which the Court upheld federal authority to set the voting age in federal elections, a classic voter qualification. Kambil told Fox News Digital the way Leibowitz read the cases “kind of made everything a mess.”
Critics also invoked Bluman v. FEC, a 2011 decision written by then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and later summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court. Bluman involved limits on campaign contributions and expenditures by foreign nationals, not a criminal prosecution for casting a ballot. Still, the language is direct.
"The Supreme Court has long held that the government (federal, state, local) may exclude foreign citizens from activities that are part of the democratic self-regulation in the United States."
Kavanaugh continued in the same opinion.
"For example, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government may bar aliens from voting, serving as jurors, working as police or probation officers, or teaching at public schools."
Election-integrity lawyers treat those lines as settled background. Leibowitz’s as-applied holding on the criminal statute now sits in tension with that tradition, which is why the appeal talk started within hours.
President Joe Biden nominated Leibowitz in 2024. The Senate confirmed him 64-33 on a bipartisan vote. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida voted in favor. Fox News Digital described Thursday’s order as the most politically consequential decision Leibowitz has issued from the bench to date.
That confirmation record now collides with the “activist judge” label coming from the right. The label is political framing, not a formal finding. The legal fight will turn on the text of the Constitution, the scope of the naturalization power, and how appellate courts read the Elections Clause and older cases such as Bluman and Oregon v. Mitchell.
Investigators and prosecutors still control the next moves. The federal government can appeal. Public reporting has not confirmed that a notice of appeal has already been filed or which panel would hear it. Florida can still decide whether to bring its own charges against Cox under state law. No public results have been released on any such state filing.
Congress can still attempt statutory repairs, including the stalled SAVE Act. States can tighten their own qualification and proof-of-citizenship rules. The Trump administration can continue citizenship verification projects and related litigation. None of those tracks is resolved by one district-court dismissal.
The constitutional question is now teed up for higher courts: does the 1996 criminal ban on noncitizen voting in federal elections survive when a judge treats it as a voter qualification reserved to the states? Leibowitz said no as applied to Cox. Lee, Spakovsky, and Kambil say the opposite and expect reversal.
Noncitizen voting is not a technical footnote. It goes to who constitutes the political community that chooses federal officers. The Constitution’s allocation of power between Congress and the states is the battlefield. One Florida ruling does not revise that allocation for the whole country. It does force the Justice Department, the states, and eventually the appellate courts to answer the question clearly instead of by assumption.
When district judges treat long-standing federal bans on alien voting as optional, the republic has a right to demand a clean appellate answer and statutes that actually bind.
