A federal appeals court on Tuesday paused the U.S. Department of Justice’s appeal of a lower court ruling that the Trump administration has no right to Arizona’s voter registration database until two other cases are resolved.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order in the lawsuit, granting a request from DOJ that the Arizona case be put on hold until the same court rules on appeals stemming from court rulings in California and Oregon in which judges also ruled that the Trump administration cannot demand that states surrender voting lists.

Those cases, United States v. Oregon and United States v. Weber, were argued in front of a three-judge panel on May 19, though the appellate court hasn’t yet issued its ruling.

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In a filing earlier this month, DOJ attorney Andrew Braniff asked the appeals court to put the brakes on the case. The federal government had been ordered to file its opening appeal by mid-July and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was set to respond by mid-August, but Braniff said in his June 12 filing that the legal issues in this case are effectively the same as in the California and Oregon cases that the 9th Circuit is already considering.

“The Oregon and Weber appeals pending before this Court present substantially the same legal issues as the present appeal in a similar procedural posture,” he wrote. “Under these circumstances, this Court should place the briefing schedule in abeyance pending the panel decisions in Oregon and Weber. Regardless of the outcome, decisions by this Court in Oregon and Weber will govern this appeal as binding circuit precedent. The decisions in those appeals will likely resolve or, at a minimum, substantially redefine, the issues in this case.”

Braniff noted that Fontes had agreed that the appeal should be put on hold until those other cases are decided.

On Tuesday, the clerk of the court entered an order granting that request.

In January, the DOJ sued Fontes after he refused several demands to turn over the state’s voter database. DOJ first asked Fontes to provide an unredacted electronic copy of Arizona’s voter registration rolls in July 2025. The next month, he told the Trump administration that state and federal privacy laws bar him from doing so.

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The lawsuit alleged that the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which the DOJ describes as imposing a “sweeping obligation on election officials” to retain and preserve election records, granted then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “sweeping power to obtain these records.”

While DOJ framed the request for voter roll information in all 50 states as part of an effort to ensure compliance with federal voting laws, voting rights advocates and other critics said its true aim is creating a national voter database in order to ferret out undocumented immigrants.

In March, a DOJ attorney conceded to a court in Rhode Island that voter registration data collected from states — a number have voluntarily given the data to the Trump administration — is being shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so it can scour voter rolls for noncitizen voters.

Trump has repeatedly, and falsely, claimed that there are tens of millions of undocumented voters — something he attempted to prove during his first term in an effort that failed to produce any evidence.

Multiple studies have found that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare and poses no meaningful threat to election integrity. When the Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, an especially conservative think tank, it “found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023” and concluded that “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

And Arizona voters in 2004 required that everyone provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. (Arizona is the only state with such a law.)

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Judge Susan Brnovich dismissed the case with prejudice in April, meaning the Justice Department cannot refile. Brnovich was appointed to the bench in 2018 by President Donald Trump.

In her order dismissing the case, Brnovich relied heavily on analysis from a federal judge in Michigan, who similarly dismissed DOJ’s attempt to get that state’s voter file.

Like that judge, Brnovich concluded that Arizona’s statewide voter registration list is not a record the state must preserve and produce on AG demand under federal law. That’s because the database is created by state elections officials, and the requirement in federal law to give DOJ voter records applies only to applications and similar records that voters submit to election officials.

And Brnovich also noted that the Trump administration’s argument would create an internal conflict in federal election law: One section in the Civil Rights Act creates a criminal penalty for “altering” documents that must be preserved and turned over to the DOJ, but the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act require elections officials to regularly update the electronic voter database.