The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by U.S. government officers have increased scrutiny of the immigration blitz on the streets of Minneapolis, but it was in a local courtroom on Monday where a federal judge raised a skeptical eye toward the Trump administration’s overall pressure campaign on the state.
Judge Katherine Menendez questioned the government’s motivation behind the immigration crackdown, pointing to a letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Saturday to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The letter laid out conditions for scaling back deportation operations in Minnesota, which included demands that the state to give the federal government access to its voter rolls, turn over state Medicaid and food assistance records and repeal sanctuary city policies.
“I mean, is there no limit to what the executive can do under the guise of enforcing immigration law?” Menendez asked.
While Minnesota is arguably feeling the brunt of the federal government like no other state — both Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey are the targets of a vague Justice Department probe — the voter roll issue across the country is a preoccupation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration.
State election officials, government ethics groups and even federal judges have raised concerns that Trump administration officials are trying to use the sensitive data to search for potential non-citizens on the rolls, and also potentially intimidate U.S. citizens who are visible minorities from exercising their right to vote in a midterm election year.
“Once that data leaves state control, it could be misused, handed over to extremists, or weaponized for political gain,” government watchdog group Common Cause said in a statement.
Bondi letter raises concerns
According to tracking by the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 44 states have received requests from the federal government for complete voter registration lists. The liberal think-tank says 11 states, overwhelmingly led by Republican officials like Texas and Arkansas, are in the process of providing lists that include driver’s licence and Social Security numbers, which go beyond the information contained in publicly available voter registration lists.
But other states, mostly led by Democratic officials, have pushed back on the requests, leading to several courtroom battles. The Justice Department has sued over 20 states, as well as the District of Columbia, in its bid for the information.
U.S. election administration is generally decentralized, although Congress in D.C. can pass laws that affect the whole country. The Justice Department says it needs to access detailed voter data to ensure election officials are following federal election laws.
“Our federal elections laws ensure every American citizen may vote freely and fairly,” assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement last month.
“States that continue to defy federal voting laws interfere with our mission of ensuring that Americans have accurate voter lists as they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results.”
The judge in Minnesota wasn’t the only one critical of Bondi’s letter to Walz.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes — who told the federal government earlier this month to “pound sand” in response to a request for detailed voter information from that southwestern state — slammed the letter to Minnesota, equating it to an organized crime shakedown.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in a social media post late Tuesday expressed concern that the Trump administration was using immigration enforcement “as a voter suppression tool.”
In Oregon, a federal judge scheduled an additional hearing Monday in an ongoing case specifically because of the Bondi letter. The judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking Oregon’s unredacted voter rolls, though the Trump administration plans to appeal.
As It Happens6:43Minnesota’s secretary of state says he will not hand over voter data to the Trump administration
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz outlining what it would take to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” including giving the U.S. Department of Justice access to Minnesota’s voter rolls. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal he has no intention of letting that happen.
String of setbacks
The federal setback in Oregon followed similar rulings last week in Georgia and California. Georgia was a notable exception in that it was Republican leadership, not Democratic, balking at the Justice Department request. It was a continuation of the pushback first witnessed by most Americans on a now-famous Trump phone call made public after the 2020 election, in which he pressed Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes for him.
Meanwhile, federal Judge David O. Carter in the California case said the request was illegal, involving an “unprecedented amount of confidential voter data,” which would have put the information of 23 million state residents at risk.
“The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left,” Carter wrote.
Democracy Docket, the site led by voting rights lawyer Marc Elias — a longtime figure of scorn for Trump since working on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — has warned about the accumulation of personal data “under a Justice Department leadership that has echoed Trump’s baseless claims about widespread voter fraud.”
To Elias’s point, Bondi made unfounded claims about Pennsylvania’s election administration in the wake of the 2020 election about Pennsylvania and both she and FBI Director Kash Patel —who has also spread voter fraud theories without evidence — refused to say during their confirmation processes whether they thought Joe Biden fairly won that vote.
Trump’s incessant claims of voter fraud that helped propel Biden to victory were rejected by the courts but helped amass a throng of supporters who rioted at the U.S. Capitol. One study that analyzed hundreds of audits in over half of the states in the 2020 election concluded that the “net error rate in counting presidential votes was on the order of thousandths of a percent, with similarly inconsequential errors for other state and federal contests.”
The Associated Press uncovered 475 potential cases of voter fraud in 2020 in the six close states it studied, often involving felons voting and others submitting ballots for the deceased.
Challenges to the non-citizen narrative
In 2016, Trump even protested, in effect, the scope of his own election victory. Insisting that Clinton’s popular vote advantage of more than 2.8 million was fuelled by non-citizens voting for the Democrat, Trump set up a federal commission that was disbanded without producing substance for those claims.
“Claiming that there’s a lot of voter fraud, and claiming it’s non-citizens, is a way of kind of bringing together two Republican boogeymen … tying together two narratives completely unsupported by the facts,” election law expert Rick Hasen said Tuesday to the Contrarian, a Substack site that donates its profits to fund ongoing court cases against the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump wants to do away with mail-in voting, claiming it’s responsible for ‘massive voter fraud’ in the U.S. Andrew Chang explores what might really be behind Trump’s contempt for mail-in ballots and what he can actually do about it.
Images provided by Getty Images, The Canadian Press and Reuters.
The CATO Institute, co-founded by frequent Republican donor Charles Koch, has debunked some specific claims about non-citizen voting favoured by MAGA entities that support Trump, while pointing to paltry vote totals in a number of local elections where they have been allowed to vote.
“Ironically, non-citizens in America show very little propensity to register or vote even in the handful of progressive jurisdictions that have given them the franchise in races for local offices, such as city council and school board,” the libertarian think-tank said.
Knowingly committing voter fraud can lead to a prison sentence, making it a risky proposition for unauthorized U.S. residents even before the supercharged deportation efforts of Trump’s second administration.
Trump has already changed the landscape of this year’s midterms, convincing a handful of Republican-led states to redraw House districts in a bid to gain advantage. Trump is hoping to avoid a repeat of his first presidential term, where Republicans dropped 42 seats and lost control of the House in the 2018 midterms.
Democrats in some states have fought back with their own redistricting, but legal challenges are ongoing and will need to be adjudicated soon. Party primaries in some states begin in March, with the midterm elections taking place on Nov. 3.
