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