A federal judge imposed a sweeping emergency order halting various aggressive tactics employed by the Trump administration in recent days to pressure election officials across the country.

“Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters,” US District Judge Trina Thompson said in her opinion granting a temporary restraining order Friday evening.

She said, while her order is in place, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security cannot demand that election officials in any state segregate ballots, purge voters from voter rolls, or halt ballot processing. Thompson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, is also blocking threats of criminal prosecutions against election officials from those agencies and said that the administration cannot take other actions that “threaten, intimidate or coerce” election officials to demand changes in ballot processing procedures on claims the voters are ineligible.

Thompson’s opinion rebuked claims the administration has made for months that it can and will prosecute election officials for not doing enough to prevent illegal voting.

“When state and local government employees perform the work of distributing, processing, or counting ballots or otherwise administering the 2026 midterm election” in accordance with the law, “they do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote,” she wrote.

She is also requiring the administration inform her of any “search warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas, or other demands to access election materials or ballots” that have been issued related to lists the administration has created to allege individuals are ineligible to vote.

The judge set her order to expire November 16. CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

The case was brought in the Northern District of California — a court known to lean left — by a coalition of labor unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens. They allege the administration’s recent conduct violates the Voting Rights Act and amounts to an unconstitutional intrusion into state control over election administration.

Central to the administration’s efforts is a controversial data-matching operation DHS has spearheaded that has compared state voter lists with federal records. Election officials say the lists of suspected noncitizens DHS has created using the program are unreliable and include US citizens.

Several judges are now scrutinizing that approach in cases brought in recent weeks.

The Trump administration’s aggressive efforts have increasingly run aground in the courts — as the federal government attempts to force states to cooperate with the push it says is aimed at preventing noncitizens from voting.

Despite lawsuits, the Justice Department has sought to increase pressure, sending letters to 29 states and Washington, DC, threatening investigations and demanding that they preserve records and voter data from the 2024 election. Federal law already requires jurisdictions to preserve records for 22 months after an election.

In California, where the Justice Department has sued to try to block the counting of ballots of thousands of voters that the federal government says may be noncitizens, a federal appeals court has rejected the administration’s demands.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the administration doesn’t have the right to intervene in how the states verify citizenship status. (CNN)