ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter records it said were illegally removed over the past two months in an effort to prevent citizens from voting.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted a request for an injunction brought against Virginia election officials by the Department of Justice, which alleged that voter registrations were improperly voided during a 90-day quiet period before by the November election, which restricts states from making large-scale changes to them. voter lists.

State officials said they would appeal. The ruling also drew criticism from former President Donald Trump, who posted on social media that the decision “is a totally unacceptable travesty.”

“Only American citizens should be allowed to vote,” Trump wrote.

In issuing the ruling Friday, Giles bristled at the suggestion that he would restore voting rights to non-citizens. She said the state had no evidence that the purged voters were not citizens, but went ahead and canceled their registrations anyway, in violation of federal law.

“I don’t deal with beliefs,” she told a Virginia attorney when he again referred to the abductees on the lists as noncitizens. “I’m dealing with evidence.”

The Justice Department and private groups, including the League of Women Voters, said many of the 1,600 voters whose registrations were canceled were actually citizens whose registrations were canceled because of bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes, such as be a wrongly ticked box on a form.

Justice Department attorney Sejal Jhaveri said during an all-day hearing Thursday in Alexandria, Va., that that’s precisely why federal law prevents states from implementing systematic changes to voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. , “to prevent the harm of having eligible. remote voters at a time when it is hard to fix.”

Giles said Friday that the state is not outright prohibited from removing citizens from voting rolls during the 90-day quiet period, but must do so on an individual basis, rather than through the automatic and systematic program used by state.

State officials unsuccessfully argued that the revoked registrations followed careful procedures targeting people who explicitly identified themselves as noncitizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Charles Cooper, an attorney for the state, said during Thursday’s hearing that the federal law was never intended to protect non-citizens, who by definition cannot vote in federal elections.

“Congress could not have intended to prevent the removal … of people who were never eligible to vote in the first place,” Cooper argued.

The plaintiffs who brought the suit, however, said many people are wrongly identified as noncitizens by the DMV simply by checking the wrong box on a form. They were unable to identify exactly how many of the 1,600 purged voters are actually citizens—Virginia only this week identified the names and addresses of affected people in response to a court order—but provided anecdotal evidence of people whose records were wrongly cancelled.

Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as non-citizens may be citizens, but said restoring them to the rolls means, in all likelihood, “hundreds of non-citizens will be back on those rolls. If a non-citizen votes, it nullifies a legal vote. And that is an evil,” he said.

Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order in August requiring daily checks of DMV data against voter rolls to identify non-citizens.

State officials said any voter identified as a non-citizen was notified and given two weeks to appeal the disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form proving their citizenship, their registration would not be cancelled.

Before Youngkin’s executive order, the state conducted monthly checks of voter rolls against DMV data under a state law passed in 2006.

Youngkin said the Justice Department wrongly targeted him for following a law that was followed by his predecessors, including Democrats, even though they did not go the extra step of ordering daily checks as it did in his order executive.