Bondi’s injection of voter roll demands into Minneapolis ICE tensions draws claims of ‘ransom’

By Tierney Sneed, Fredreka Schouten, CNN

(CNN) — Attorney General Pam Bondi’s demand that Minnesota hand over sensitive voter registration records to the federal government amid tensions over ICE and immigration enforcement underscores the importance of the administration’s nationwide data grab that is facing resistance in multiple states and has stumbled in the courts.

The Justice Department has already sued Minnesota and 23 other states for the voter data, but Bondi on Saturday urged Gov. Tim Walz to help “bring an end to the chaos,” by turning over the records, among other requests.

The administration has said it wants the full registration records so that they can “help” states “clean” their rolls of ineligible voters. Voter advocates, former DOJ attorneys and at least one federal judge are dubious that’s the administration’s only goal with the data collection.

As courts review the DOJ’s rationale for needing the data, a separate judge – handling a challenge to the administration’s immigration tactics – expressed concerns with how Bondi raised the demand in the context of the unrest.

“Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” district Judge Kate Menendez asked the Justice Department directly during a hearing Monday.

An attorney for the DOJ replied that the administration was simply “trying to enforce federal law.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, like many other state officials, has declined to provide the data because he says doing so would violate state and federal privacy laws.

Simon told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday that it was “deeply disturbing” to receive Bondi’s letter.

“Literally hours after the second, let’s not forget second, killing of an American citizen in the city of Minneapolis by ICE agents … there’s this term sheet,” he said, “this ransom note.”

Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, compared Bondi’s letter to “organized crime”.

“They move into your neighborhood. They start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want. This is not how America is supposed to work,” Fontes said in a social media post.

Bondi’s letter did not explicitly promise a change in President Donald Trump’s immigration approach in exchange for the voter records, instead pointing to a need to “bring back law and order” to Minneapolis.

Asked for comment, the Justice Department pointed to comments by Bondi on Saturday blaming Minnesota officials for inviting the “worst of the worst” to Minneapolis through “sanctuary city” policies.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson argued that the Justice Department has “full authority” to ensure states comply with federal election laws.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” she said.

Setbacks in court

The department, in its unprecedented data-gathering campaign, has requested states produce their full voter rolls, which can include non-public information like voters’ Social Security and driver’s license numbers, full birth dates and current addresses.

But even the Justice Department’s stated plan of conducting its own review of the rolls is raising legal questions amid concerns that eligible voters may be purged.

The department says it’s entitled to registration records under the 1960 Civil Rights Act but no court yet has agreed with that argument, and two courts have rejected it outright.

A federal judge in California threw out the department’s voter-roll lawsuit against that state earlier this month, with a scathing opinion that warned against “unbridled consolidation of all elections power in the Executive without action from Congress and public debate.” A judge in Oregon also has decided to dismiss the case, finding DOJ’s legal arguments lacking, he confirmed in a hearing Monday.

Amid those court losses, Bondi pressing the dispute in her letter to Walz “appears to be desperation,” said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who now leads Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Apparent GOP resistance

In most of the lawsuits, DOJ has targeted Democratic state officials, but that doesn’t mean that Republican-led states have been eager to hand over their voter rolls.

The Trump administration first sent state officials letters requesting the sensitive voter information in the summer, but so far, just 14 states have either fully complied or are working on complying with the requests, according to comments a department lawyer made in court.

States that go along with the department’s demands are opening themselves to lawsuits as well. Voter advocates have sued Nebraska to prevent the state from handing over voters’ personal information to the DOJ. The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, has warned 10 states about potential legal problems in a plan – surfaced in proposed agreements the department offered states – to hand over their voter rolls for extra scrutiny by the federal government.

The proposals say that the Department would notify the states of “issues” it has found in their registration records, and states would then have 45 days to “clean” the rolls of ineligible voters. Such a process could run afoul of a federal law that puts guardrails on how and when states can remove voters, the DNC said, pointing to steps the law requires before purging voters who are believed to have moved.

Election officials in at least two of the states targeted by Democrats have since said that, while they are sharing the data with the Trump administration, they have declined to agree to the proposal’s terms.

Revamped data tool draws scrutiny, concerns

The administration’s stated desire to take a more direct role in list maintenance comes as a tool Trump has encouraged states to use on a voluntary basis to purge their rolls appears to pose its own problems.

Last year, a division of the Department of Homeland Security dramatically revamped a tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement or SAVE, which has been used for years to verify the immigration and citizenship status of people seeking government benefits.

The expanded tool now includes access to Social Security and US passport data, and the Trump administration has encouraged states to upload their voter files to the beefed-up SAVE system to hunt for potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.

But questions persist about the accuracy of the results and the potential impact on eligible voters if state and local officials don’t fully vet the matches the system generates.

In deep-red Texas, for instance, state election officials last year identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on the rolls after running its full list of more than 18 million voters through the SAVE system. The state in turn asked local election officials to verify the citizenship status of the flagged voters in their counties.

But in Travis County, home to Austin, a more thorough search of the state’s own data showed that 11 of 97 county voters initially flagged by the Secretary of State’s office as potential noncitizens already had provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote through the state driver’s license division, according to Celia Israel, who oversees the county’s voter registration program.

CNN’s Marshall Cohen and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.

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