The fatal shootings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty by U.S. law enforcement officers have heightened scrutiny of the immigration crackdown on Minneapolis streets, but a federal judge in a local court on Monday raised doubts about the Trump administration’s overall crackdown on the state.
Judge Katherine Mendez questioned the government’s motives behind the immigration crackdown A letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi Saturday to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The letter lays out conditions for Minnesota to roll back immigration operations, including requiring the state to hand over voter records to the federal government, turn over state Medicaid and food assistance records, and repeal sanctuary city policies.
“I mean, aren’t there limits to what the executive branch can do under the guise of enforcing immigration laws?” Menendez asked.
Minnesota, like many other states, is feeling the pressure from the federal government — both Walsh and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Unclear targets of Justice Department investigation — The issue of voter registration across the country is the subject of US President Donald Trump’s second administration.
State election officials, government ethics groups and even Federal judges The Trump administration has raised concerns that officials are using sensitive information to try to track down registered non-citizens, and may also threaten visible minority U.S. citizens from exercising their right to vote in a midterm election year.
“Once that information is out of government control, it can be misused, given to extremists or weaponized for political gain,” the government watchdog group Common Cause said in a statement.
Bondi’s letter creates a threat
According to Brennan Justice Center monitoring, At least 44 states They have received requests from the federal government for complete voter registration details. The liberal think tank said 11 states, led by heavily Republican officials such as Texas and Arkansas, are in the process of providing lists that include driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
But other states, mostly led by Democratic officials, pushed back on the requests, leading to more court battles. The Justice Department has sued more than 20 states as well as the District of Columbia in a bid to obtain the information.
Election administration in the United States is generally decentralized, although Congress in DC can make laws that affect the country. The Justice Department said it must obtain voter details to ensure election officials are following federal election laws.
“Our federal election laws ensure that every American citizen can vote freely and fairly,” Assistant Attorney General Harmet Dillon 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 to ensure that Americans go to the polls with accurate voter rolls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results.”
A judge in Minnesota was not the only critic of Bondi’s letter to Walz.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes – He told the federal government earlier this month “Pound Sand” in response to a request for detailed voter information from South West Province – He threw away the letter addressed to Minnesota.likening it to organized crime.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee In a social media post late Tuesday He expressed concern that the Trump administration is using immigration enforcement “as a tool of selective repression.”
A federal judge in Oregon has scheduled an additional hearing on Monday in the ongoing case Especially because of the Bondi letter. Although the Trump administration plans to appeal, the judge rejected a Justice Department lawsuit seeking Oregon’s unamended voter registration.
As it happens6:43Minnesota’s secretary of state says he won’t hand over voter information to the Trump administration.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz explaining what is needed to “stop the chaos in Minnesota.” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal that he has no intention of letting that happen.
A string of obstacles
The federal failure in Oregon followed similar decisions in Georgia and California last week. Georgia was Republican, not Democratic, at the request of the Justice Department. The push back witnessed by most Americans for the first time was a continuation of a The now famous Trump phone call He went public after the 2020 election, and the Georgia Secretary of State urged him to “seek” his vote.
Meanwhile, in the California case, federal judge David O’Carter said the request was illegal and included “unprecedented access to confidential voter information” that put the information of 23 million state residents at risk.
“Democracy is not taken away all at once; it is cut piece by piece until there is nothing left.” Carter wrote.
Democracy Docket, a site run by voting rights attorney Mark Elias — a longtime Trump detractor after working on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — warned A hoard of personal data echoes Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims “under the direction of the Justice Department.”
As far as Elias’ point, Bondi said. Unfounded claims about Pennsylvania’s election administration Because of the 2020 election, about Pennsylvania and both she and FBI Director Kash Patel — which also expanded Voter fraud theories without evidence – They declined to say whether they thought Joe Biden actually won that vote during their confirmation process.
Trump’s claims of voter fraud, which helped propel Biden to victory, have been rejected by the courts, but he has managed to rally many supporters who have rioted in the US Capitol. A study The analysis of hundreds of audits in more than half of the states in the 2020 election concluded that “the net error rate in counting presidential votes was on the order of a thousand percent, with similarly negligible errors for other state and federal contests.”
The Associated Press found 475 cases of possible voter fraud in six contiguous states it studied in 2020, often involving felons voting and others submitting ballots for the dead.
Narrative challenges for the non-citizen
In the year In 2016, Trump disputed the magnitude of his own election victory. Claiming that more than 2.8 million of Clinton’s popular vote gains were driven by noncitizens who voted for the Democrat, Trump set up a scattered federal commission without producing substance to those claims.
“To say there’s a lot of voter fraud and to say it’s non-citizens is a way to put two Republican bogeys together … to attach two narratives to reality,” election law expert Rick Hasson said Tuesday. Contrariana Substack website that donates profits to support ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump wants to end mail-in voting, saying it’s responsible for ‘massive voter fraud’ in the United States.Andrew Chang explores what might be behind Trump’s disdain for postal voting and what he can do about it. Images courtesy of Getty Images, The Canadian Press and Reuters.
He owns the CATO Institute, co-founded by frequent Republican donor Charles Koch. He rejected some specific claims about non-citizen voting Backed by pro-Trump MAGA constituents, they pointed to the cumulative totals in several local elections where they were allowed to vote.
“Surprisingly, noncitizens in the U.S. are less likely to register or vote, even in progressive states that have given them the franchise in local offices like city council and school boards,” the libertarian think tank said.
Knowingly committing voter fraud could lead to arrests, making it a dangerous proposition for unauthorized US residents even before the highly charged immigration efforts of the second Trump administration.
Trump changed the landscape of this year’s midterms by persuading House districts to be redrawn to benefit a handful of Republican-led states. Trump in 2016 In the 2018 midterms, Republicans hope to avoid a repeat of the first presidential term in which they lost control of the House, dropping 42 seats.
Democrats in some states have fought their own redistricting, but legal challenges are underway and should get a ruling soon. In some states, party primaries begin in March, with midterm elections on November 3.