The LA City Council voted 10-5 on June 18 to advance a charter amendment asking voters whether noncitizens should cast ballots in city and school board elections, a move that arrives just days after the Trump administration directed ICE to deport noncitizens who vote.
Ten members of the Los Angeles City Council decided last Thursday that the question of whether noncitizens should vote in city elections is one Los Angeles residents deserve to settle themselves. The 10-5 vote advances a charter amendment to the November ballot, where Angelenos will be asked whether the city charter should be amended to give the council authority to later authorize noncitizen voting in municipal and Los Angeles Unified School District races. The measure was introduced by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez and seconded by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, both Democratic Socialists representing districts on the east side of the city.
The proposal does not directly authorize noncitizen voting. It asks voters to grant the council that power, and the council would then have to pass a separate ordinance to actually implement it. Two steps, not one. But the direction is not in doubt, and the politics of it are unmistakable.
For years, Republicans who raised the prospect of Democrats pursuing noncitizen voting were dismissed as conspiracy theorists and fear-mongers. The standard Democratic talking point, repeated across cable programs and op-ed pages, was that the allegation was a right-wing fabrication designed to stoke fear about immigrants. The Federalist noted this week that Democrats had repeatedly insisted no such agenda existed.
Now the second-largest city in the country, run entirely by Democrats, has voted 10-5 to put exactly that agenda before voters. The councilmembers who pushed this forward did not attempt to obscure what they were doing. Soto-Martínez argued the measure would give voice to the "hundreds of thousands" of noncitizen Angelenos who live, work, and pay taxes in Los Angeles. It is an honest case for an honest position. What it is not is consistent with years of Democratic denials that this was ever the plan.
Five council members voted no. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who represents the Seventh District, said she supports the concept but raised concerns about cost, implementation logistics, and how the city would handle the sensitive immigration information of participants. Los Angeles relies on the county to administer its elections, meaning the city would likely need to build out its own election infrastructure if noncitizen voting were eventually adopted. Bob Blumenfield, John Lee, Tim McOsker, and Adrin Nazarian also voted against.
A federal collision course
The timing sharpens everything. On June 9, nine days before the council vote, the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive ordering ICE to deport noncitizens who cast ballots in American elections. The directive cited the Immigration and Nationality Act, which makes aliens who illegally vote in U.S. elections deportable. DHS General Counsel James Percival sent the instruction to ICE leadership, and the agency updated its guidance accordingly.
The collision is not hypothetical. If Los Angeles voters approve the charter amendment in November and the council eventually passes an authorizing ordinance, noncitizens who vote in city elections would be participating in a locally sanctioned process while simultaneously risking deportation under federal law. The city cannot override federal immigration enforcement. Local ordinances do not preempt federal statute. Any noncitizen who voted under a future Los Angeles ordinance would be doing so under legal exposure that city hall cannot remove.
DHS has separately identified approximately 24,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls nationwide, according to the Washington Times, and has been pushing states to run their voter lists through the agency's SAVE database. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has also updated its policy manual to bar green card holders who have voted or registered to vote in violation of federal law from obtaining citizenship.
The charter amendment measure now goes to the city attorney to prepare ballot language for November. Los Angeles voters, not the council, will have the final word on whether to grant this authority. Whether they will approve it in a city that went heavily Democratic in 2024 is a question, but the fact that ten elected Democrats voted to put it on the ballot in the current federal climate tells you something about how confident the council's progressive flank is in the city's political direction.
Republicans in Congress have pushed the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. It has not advanced in the Senate. The November vote in Los Angeles, whatever its outcome, will be the most prominent test yet of whether urban Democratic electorates actually want this, or whether the councilmembers who advanced the measure are running well ahead of the residents they represent.
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