The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will allow states to access federal citizenship data by June 30 and plans to monitor the flow of mail ballots for signs of voter fraud, according to a court document.

Amid a series of lawsuits, President Donald Trump’s administration is now moving to carry out a March 31 executive order restricting voting by mail ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrats and voting rights advocates oppose the directive as unconstitutional election meddling by Trump and have sued to stop him. The president, who has long attacked mail ballots but votes by mail himself, says the additional rules will fight noncitizen voting, a rare phenomenon.

“No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite election rules or dictate how states administer their elections,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, said in a statement last week. The League of Women Voters filed one of at least five lawsuits challenging the order.

Potential disruptions

The order could carry major consequences for the midterm elections. Any new restrictions on mail ballots would risk disrupting how tens of millions of voters cast their ballots. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

But despite several legal challenges, the order remains in effect. 

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., in late May ruled against a request by Democratic groups to pause the order, finding that it was too soon to weigh in because federal officials hadn’t taken enough action yet. A second judge in Massachusetts held a hearing last week, but didn’t immediately issue a decision.

“The Trump Administration will continue fighting for the safety and security of American elections,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement shortly after the D.C. judge’s decision.

One portion of the order demands the postmaster general enact new restrictions on mailed ballots and not transmit ballots from states that refuse to provide the names of absentee voters. The U.S. Postal Service, despite its status as an independent corporation, has put forward a proposal in line with the order to require states to submit lists of voters before mailing ballots.

Now, Homeland Security is responding to another part of the order that requires the creation of lists of voting-age citizens in every state, which the Trump administration calls “state citizenship lists.” State election officials would receive the lists, which they could compare to their voter rolls in a search for noncitizen voters.

Homeland Security’s plans for the citizenship lists came into focus on June 5, when the U.S. Department of Justice filed a notice in federal court that briefly outlines the administration’s plans. The notice describes a two-part effort by Homeland Security and its subsidiary agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to comply with the order.

First, Homeland Security will implement a “State Voter Roll Verification” that allows state election officials to submit their voter rolls to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. 

SAVE is a powerful computer program that checks names against citizenship information held in a variety of government databases. It can flag registered voters as possible noncitizens, but faces criticism for incorrect identifications.

For the past year, states have already had the option to upload their voter rolls into SAVE. Some Republican-led states, such as Indiana, Texas and Wyoming, have used the system, while Democratic states have declined. It’s unclear how the State Voter Roll Verification would be different, if at all, from states’ current SAVE access. 

Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom.

Second, the Justice Department notice says Homeland Security will set up a registry for state election officials to securely access “citizenship-related data” from USCIS, the Social Security Administration and the State Department.

According to the notice, the “underlying data would remain in each agency’s respective system.” No other details were provided.

The notice also outlines Homeland Security’s intention to use the lists of voters that states provide to the Postal Service for investigations. It says DHS wants to “integrate” data on those voters “to monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

California elections

The notice comes as Trump renews his attacks on mail-in voting. Last week he alleged, without evidence, voter fraud in California, which held primary elections last week. California relies heavily on mail ballots and often counts votes at a slow pace — meaning final results sometimes don’t match election night vote totals.

“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

While the executive order already faces a slew of lawsuits, the NAACP on June 3 filed a motion in federal court seeking to specifically block the Postal Service’s proposed regulations of mail ballots. The NAACP alleges the regulations violate a 2021 settlement agreement that requires timely delivery of election mail to all voters. 

The Postal Service has until Thursday to respond.

The American Postal Workers Union in a statement on June 5 denounced the executive order, saying the Postal Service serves all Americans. It is “not a tool for politicians” to pick which Americans receive which benefits, the union said.

“The Executive Order is an unconstitutional attack on the millions of Americans who vote by mail,” the union said, “and another front in an ongoing assault on voting rights in the United States of America.”

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday suggested to a federal appeals court that upholding a lower court decision blocking the Trump administration’s access to sensitive voter data would weaken its ability to investigate racial discrimination in voting.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held oral arguments on whether to reverse a district court judge’s opinion that Michigan doesn’t have to provide the Justice Department with its unredacted voter list that contains dates of birth, driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers. 

At the core of the case is how federal courts should interpret the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which grants the U.S. attorney general broad access to documents and records that “come into the possession” of election officials. Congress passed the law to empower investigations into voting discrimination against Black citizens. 

A lawyer for the Trump administration on Wednesday sought to discredit the logic behind the district court judge’s decision. He said the decision would have hampered 1960s era investigations into discrimination against Black voters if it had been in place at that time. An assistant Michigan attorney general called that a major misreading of the law.

The judges did not meaningfully suggest which argument they found persuasive.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal to turn over the data. At least 15 conservative states have voluntarily provided the information, which the Trump administration plans to feed into a Department of Homeland Security computer program to identify potential noncitizen voters.

Democrats and voting rights advocates have raised privacy concerns about the Trump administration’s plans for the data. They also say Homeland Security has wrongly flagged voters as potential noncitizens and that the administration is seeking to build a national voter list.

The Justice Department’s courtroom argument on Wednesday came amid the backdrop of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision two weeks ago to severely weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was intended to stamp out discriminatory voting laws in the South. Trump has cheered the ruling and Republican state lawmakers in Southern states are rushing to draw new congressional maps that could oust Black Democrats.

Debate over Civil Rights Act

U.S District Court Judge Hala Jarbou, an appointee of President Donald Trump, in February ruled that the Justice Department isn’t entitled to voters’ data. Michigan’s voter registration database is a record created by state officials, not a document that comes into their possession, she reasoned.

On Wednesday, Justice Department attorney David Goldman told a panel of three appellate judges that Jarbou had created a “carveout” in the Civil Rights Act not rooted in the law. 

“It carves a hole in the attorney general’s investigative authority so gaping that the most blatant civil rights violations of the 1960s could have marched right through it,” Goldman said.

Michigan Assistant Attorney General Heather Meingast, representing Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, told the judges that the Justice Department’s demand is unprecedented and unsupported by federal law. 

The state’s voter registration database includes voter information but isn’t a document under the Civil Rights Act, Meingast argued. The database is dynamic, she said, constantly changing as voters are added and removed.

“It doesn’t seem to meet the test of what the (Civil Rights Act) was talking about in the 60s,” Meingast said. “And the purpose was voters turning in their documents, their applications, their poll taxes.”

Judges don’t tip hand

The case is being heard by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole, Jr., a Clinton appointee; Judge Andre B. Mathis, a Biden appointee; and Judge John B. Nalbandian, a Trump appointee.

Much of the judges’ questions centered on what it means for records to “come into the possession” of election officials. The judges posed skeptical questions to both sides, leaving it unclear who will prevail.

One judge likened the voter database to baking a cake, an image used in a brief filed by voters and civic groups in the case. Anyone baking a cake wouldn’t say they “came into possession” of a cake, the judge said.

“What about common sense?” the judge said.

The 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, provided an audio-only livestream of the arguments and the judges didn’t identify themselves when speaking. Courthouse News Service reported the judge who made the remark was Nalbandian.

The oral arguments lasted about 40 minutes. The three-judge panel gave no deadline for issuing an opinion.

Other cases

In the Justice Department’s voter data lawsuits, six district court judges have ruled against the Trump administration — in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Rhode Island, in addition to Michigan. The Michigan case is the first to reach oral argument before an appellate court. Oral arguments are set for next week in appeals of the DOJ’s losses in California and Oregon.

The appellate cases mark the next stage of the Justice Department’s year-long campaign for state voter data. DOJ attorneys have urged appeals courts to move quickly, arguing that the security of the November midterm elections is at stake.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department released an opinion from its Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to executive branch agencies, that supports the DOJ’s efforts to obtain state voter data. DOJ attorneys immediately filed the opinion in the Michigan appeal in a last-minute bid to bolster their case before oral arguments.

“It’s memorializing advice that was given in early to mid-September,” Goldman said — the same time period when the Justice Department began suing states for refusing to turn over voter data.

Aria Branch, an attorney at the Elias Law Group representing voters and a civic group in the case, noted that six courts have already ruled against the Justice Department. 

“DOJ’s attempt to exploit the Civil Rights Act for its current dragnet simply resembles trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” Branch told the judges. “It simply doesn’t work.”

Americans’ views on crime often don’t match reality — and a new report suggests those perceptions are shaped as much by personal experiences and economic conditions as by crime itself.

The analysis, released by the nonprofit think tank Council on Criminal Justice, draws on decades of Gallup survey data to examine how people perceive crime and what drives those beliefs. The report’s authors found that, since the 1960s, public perceptions of crime have frequently diverged from actual crime trends.

Even during periods when crime declined, most Americans continued to believe it was rising. From 2005 to 2024, about 69% of survey respondents on average said crime was higher than the year before, despite overall crime rates falling in most of those years, according to the report.

Fear of crime has remained relatively stable over time. In 2024, 35% of Americans said they were afraid to walk alone at night — the same share as in 1968.

The researchers found that public concern tends to track major shifts in homicide rates more closely than broader crime trends. But overall, people’s views about crime and their fear of it have not matched shifts in crime rates for most years, according to the report.

Instead, the analysis points to other factors that shape how Americans think about public safety.

Household victimization — whether someone in the home has been a victim of a crime — was one of the strongest predictors of both fear and the belief that crime is increasing. 

Property crimes, such as theft, and people’s own experiences with crime were more closely tied to concerns about the issue than actual violent crime rates.

Economic sentiment also played a role. People who said it was a good time to find a job or expected to spend the same or more on holiday shopping were less likely to say crime was rising and less likely to report fear of walking alone at night, according to the report.

Political views showed a more limited effect. While people with more conservative ideologies were somewhat more likely to perceive crime as increasing, political party affiliation itself was not a significant factor after accounting for economic conditions and other variables.

Higher presidential and congressional approval ratings were associated with a greater likelihood that respondents said crime was staying the same or declining, according to the report.

Local conditions, meanwhile, were more closely linked to personal fears than to perceptions of crime overall. The researchers found that neighborhood factors, such as poverty and youth population, were associated with whether people said they were afraid, but did not generally influence whether they believed crime was rising locally or nationally.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

A quarter of immigration arrests since August were labeled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “collateral,” a type of arrest and detention that’s been challenged in court as an end run around civil rights.

Public outrage and lawsuits over the arrests may be tamping down the large-scale sweeps that foster them, but tens of thousands were arrested this way between August and early March.

Immigration arrests are usually based on warrants obtained ahead of time, showing either a removal order from immigration court or evidence of a crime or charge that makes the person subject to deportation.

But collateral arrests can result from street sweeps and raids in which a person is singled out for questioning based on appearance or proximity to someone wanted on a warrant. That person could be taken into custody if agents think they may be subject to deportation and also likely to flee if released.

Labeled for the first time ever, the collateral arrests are reported from August to early March in ICE arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Stateline. In that time there were about 64,000 collateral arrests, a quarter of the 253,000 total arrests by ICE.

About 70% of the collateral arrests were for people with immigration-related crimes or violations alone, compared with 41% for arrests with warrants. Less than 2% of those with collateral arrests were convicted of a violent crime, one-third the rate of other arrests, and only 18% were convicted of any crime, compared with 33% for other arrests.

The collateral arrests contributed to an overall pattern of lower and lower shares of arrests for serious crimes, and more for immigration offenses alone.

Arrests climbed from about 12,000 in January 2025 to more than 40,000 in December, but fell back to 30,000 this February. The share of people with only immigration-related crimes and violations rose to more than half in December and January, the peak months for collateral arrests, and the share of violent criminals fell from 10% to 4% of arrests in that time.

New policy

ICE announced a new policy in January to issue warrants in real time if agents think an immigrant is deportable and “likely to escape,” though that policy faces a court challenge.

Total arrests and collateral arrests have been falling since December, whether because of the new policy or because of cutbacks in the large-scale street sweeps that tend to produce them.

One factor is public outrage over raids sweeping up noncriminals in places like Minneapolis and Chicago, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

“The sort of large operations within big cities, as they were occurring, seems to have subsided somewhat,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “After the kind of public outcry following Minneapolis, it seems as though, at least for now, that tactic has kind of been paused.”

The Trump administration’s focus on mass deportation opened the way for more collateral street arrests with less investigation, she added.

“If it’s a more targeted arrest, they would take the time to sort of essentially have an investigation. It’s a pretty resource-intensive way that just would not yield the kind of numbers ICE was being told to produce,” she said.

The new policy was filed in court papers in February as a response to a lawsuit over ICE sweeps in the District of Columbia last year, alleging ICE agents “have flooded the streets of the nation’s capital, indiscriminately arresting without warrants and without probable cause District residents whom the agents perceive to be Latino.”

The case resulted in a preliminary injunction in December requiring a halt to warrantless arrests without establishing probable cause that the person is living here illegally and is a flight risk.

One plaintiff in the class-action case, José Escobar Molina, said in the lawsuit that agents in two cars pulled up to him as he approached his work truck on Aug. 21, grabbing him by the arms and legs and handcuffing him without asking any questions. Escobar, 47, said in the court papers that he’s lived in the district for 25 years and has had temporary protected status as a Salvadoran native the whole time. He was held overnight in Virginia before being released.

Other lawsuits are also challenging collateral arrests, such as an incident in Idaho in which agents with warrants for five people ended up arresting 105 immigrants at a Latino community event in October.

In North Carolina, four U.S. citizens and a visa holder sued in February, saying they were arrested in the Charlotte’s Web immigration crackdown in November without warrants, as is typical of collateral arrests.

“I have a lot of fear that this will happen to me again. I was essentially kidnapped based only on the color of my skin. That really weighs on me,” said Yoshi Cuenca Villamar, one of the citizens and a North Carolina native, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. He said he was doing landscaping work Nov. 15 when agents pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him, then held him in a car before releasing him.

One Illinois case that started in the first Trump administration challenged warrantless arrests and traffic stops used as a pretext for immigration arrests. A 2022 settlement required ICE to document “reasonable suspicion” of illegal status before arresting somebody. The case continues since a judge found in February that the new ICE policy of issuing warrants in real time after a detention violates the consent decree.

Shares of collateral arrests

In the months since August where collateral arrests are now labeled, the District of Columbia and Illinois stand out with high shares of collateral arrests. More than half the arrests in the district were collateral, as were 41% of those in Illinois. There were eight states in which at least 30% of arrests were collateral: Alabama, Maryland, West Virginia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine and Minnesota.

West Virginia, where there was a “statewide surge” of immigration enforcement in January with state and local cooperation, stands out for its high rate of total arrests as well as a large share of collateral arrests.

ICE labeled 1,300 arrests during Operation Metro Surge as ‘collateral’

For the eight months between August and early March, West Virginia had 1,831 arrests, or 1 in 10 of the state’s noncitizen population as of 2024, the latest data available. That’s by far the largest share in the country, followed by 7% in Wyoming (where truck drivers were targeted for immigration arrests in February) and 4% in Mississippi.

West Virginia Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey, in a statement, cited the cooperation of state and local agencies with ICE through the 287(g) program that assists with immigration enforcement. He praised ICE, saying “they have removed dangerous illegal immigrants from our communities and made our state safer for families and law-abiding citizens.”

Few of those arrested in the surge were violent criminals, however. More than half of those arrested during the surge were collateral arrests, and only 1% — nine immigrants — had a violent crime conviction, according to the Stateline analysis. More than three-quarters, about 500 people, had only an immigration-related violation or crime.

Judges didn’t always agree that collateral arrests and detentions in the West Virginia surge were legal under the U.S. Constitution. U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, a Clinton appointee, ordered two detainees released in January. He noted that “similar seizures and detentions are occurring frequently across the country” without any evidence they’re necessary as required by the Constitution.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday appeared likely to allow law enforcement to continue seeking warrants for the location history of cellphones near crime scenes, even as the justices wrestled with how far the government must go to protect Americans’ privacy.

Some of the justices appeared to be searching for a middle ground during oral arguments in a case out of Virginia challenging what is known as a geofence warrant that was used to catch a bank robber. Several justices asked skeptical questions of both sides, though no one voiced explicit support for prohibiting such warrants altogether.

As smartphones have become ubiquitous, along with apps that track users’ movements, the high court is once again wading into how the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, applies in the digital era. The justices’ decision, of tremendous interest to state attorneys general, will shape how easy or difficult it is for investigators to sweep up location data.

Over the past two decades, geofence warrants have become a major tool of law enforcement. At a basic level, they allow police to identify phones within a geographic area for a certain period of time. 

The data can be tremendously valuable to investigators, offering a way to develop suspects in crimes where their identities aren’t otherwise known. Underscoring their importance, a broad bipartisan coalition of states has urged the justices to uphold the warrants.

But civil liberties advocates say geofence warrants ensnare people in digital dragnets, handing the government data on anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They argue that accessing data on anyone within a certain area — the geofence — amounts to a general warrant prohibited by the Constitution.

Summing up the high court’s uncertainty in Monday’s arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett told U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin, who was arguing in favor of law enforcement access to location data, that while he had described his opponent’s position as maximalist, “there’s a risk of the government’s position being maximalist the other way.”

“I was just going to say this seems very complicated from the user’s point of view, frankly,” Barrett said at a different portion of the argument.

Credit union robbery

The case before the Supreme Court, Chatrie v. United States, arises from a 2019 robbery of a federal credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Okello Chatrie was convicted of armed robbery after surveillance footage showed the robber using a cellphone. A detective then obtained a geofence warrant directed at Google for devices within 150 meters of the credit union within an hour of the robbery.

Google initially provided anonymized data in response to the warrant. The detective then requested and received additional location data on nine users. Finally, the detective received de-anonymized information on three users, without obtaining an additional warrant.

While Google has since changed the way it stores location history data to limit geofence warrants, other apps and tech firms collect the data. Lawyers for Chatrie argue that geofence warrants open the door to the authorities requesting information on everyone at a sensitive location — perhaps an abortion clinic or a political convention — at a particular time.

“The warrant authorized the government to direct Google to search every single person’s account to find those people who were within the geofence. That is a general warrant,” Adam Unikowsky, a lawyer for Chatrie, told the court.

4th Amendment debate

The Supreme Court’s last major decision on 4th Amendment rights and phones came in 2018, when the justices ruled that law enforcement generally needs a warrant for location data derived from when phones connect to a cell site. That data is generated by just having a cellphone, and the justices found that a phone is now a basic element of participating in society.

By contrast, the Trump administration argues location history data isn’t protected by the 4th Amendment because users voluntarily share it with Google and other tech firms by turning on location tracking on their phones. Because the information was turned over with their consent, users have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

“Petitioner here is asking for an unprecedented transformation of the 4th Amendment into an impregnable fortress around records of his public movements that he affirmatively consented to allow Google to create, maintain and use,” Feigin said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberal justices, argued that if the government can access location data without a warrant because Chatrie consented to sharing it with Google, then the government could obtain all sorts of other data shared with the company, such as photos and calendar entries.

“If this is consent, that means the government can seek those documents for any reason, not just the commission of a crime — or no reason, correct?” Sotomayor said.

“Correct. It would not be a search, so no search warrant would be required,” Unikowsky replied.

Red and blue states back geofence warrants

Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have filed a court brief arguing that geofence warrants can be more precise than many traditional investigative methods when supported by probable cause and appropriately tailored. In the brief, they urged the justices not to prohibit geofence warrants altogether.

State attorneys general across the political spectrum signed on to the brief. They include Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington.

Geofence warrants can generate critical leads when the perpetrators of crimes are otherwise unknown, they wrote. When suspects are unknown but the suspected wrongdoing is linked to a specific place and time, location data provides one of the narrowest available tools for finding leads, the brief argues.

“This Court should make clear that the Constitution does not categorically ban those investigative methods,” the states’ brief reads.

Google brief

In a court brief, Google said geofence warrants result in invasive searches that are overbroad. Geofence searches, by their nature, have a high risk of sometimes sweeping in thousands of innocent users, the company said.

Even small geographic areas covering short periods of time can include hundreds of thousands of people, Google argued. Geofence parameters set by law enforcement often cover more ground than the location of the crime, with private homes, apartments, government buildings, hotels, places of worship and busy roads all included.

Lawyers for Google wrote that the company takes no position on whether the warrant in the Chatrie case complies with the 4th Amendment.

“But Google firmly believes that, based on the private nature of Location History data, law enforcement was required to obtain a warrant to access that data,” the brief says.

Orin Kerr, a Stanford Law School professor and one of the nation’s foremost experts on the 4th Amendment, predicted after the oral argument that the justices would likely rule that geofence warrants can be constitutionally drafted. 

However, he was uncertain whether the court would rule on whether the geofence search that identified Chatrie’s phone was a search under the 4th Amendment.

“They’ll probably say that geofence warrants have to be limited in time and space,” Kerr wrote on social media.

National leaders warned the Detroit NAACP of an ongoing attack on democracy during what organizers say is the largest sitdown dinner of its kind in the world Sunday.

Speakers at the 71st annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, including U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Attorney General Letitia James, said efforts to obtain Michigan ballot data, require proof of citizenship to vote and potentially weaken the Voting Rights Act present a major threat to the rights of Americans.

James received the Ida B. Wells Freedom and Justice Award, which she said she shares with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel after Nessel pledged to deny the federal government access to Michigan’s ballots from the 2024 presidential election.

“This award’s namesake once said, ‘The way to right wrongs is to light the truth upon them, to shine light in the darkness,’” James said. “AG Nessel is the holder of that light of liberty in Michigan, just as our ancestors grabbed the torch of freedom and used it to light the way forward for all of us.”

Jeffries said the election of President Donald Trump in 2024 “was definitively a setback,” but said that “a setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”

He said 2026 will be the year of the “great American comeback.”

“We’re not here to step back,” Jeffries said. “We’re here to push back at all times and ensure that this country will have a free and fair election in November.”

The Democratic leader – who was introduced by several speakers as the next speaker of the House – said that “when the gavels change hands,” Democrats will pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all.”

The theme of this year’s dinner was “Liberty or Oppression – The Choice is Ours.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the “choice between liberty and oppression is really one between apathy and action.”

“They don’t want Detroit to have a voice. They can’t defend their record of failure, so they want to rig the game to win. But not on my watch, not on your watch, not on our watch,” Whitmer said. “I know it’s hard to feel energetic right now, but nothing changes if we take a back seat.”

The dinner came one day after a gunman opened fire near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., reportedly targeting Trump.

Jeffries condemned political violence and thanked law enforcement for protecting the attendees at both events.

“Here in America, we should be able to agree to disagree without ever being disagreeable with each other,” Jeffries said. “At the same time, I can assure you that we will continue to speak truth to power at all times as we navigate our way through the trials, the turbulence and the tribulations of this moment.”

James said political violence “has no place in society,” adding that she has faced threats to her own life.

But she added that she continues to “yearn and pray for a compassionate, civil, competent and inclusive government in Washington, D.C.”

The Detroit NAACP also honored civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to attend the formerly whites-only William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Jeffries said “our community has always had the ability to imagine a better future here in America and then work hard to bring it about.”

James said Bridges set an example for everyone to follow.

“If a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges can find the courage to walk through an angry, screaming mob just to get to school, so can we,” James said.

The Department of Justice’s stated reason for obtaining sensitive personal data on millions of voters masks the Trump administration’s true intention for obtaining state voter lists, Michigan’s top election official asserted in federal appeals court Monday.

Attorneys for Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson made the allegation in a brief in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The argument reflects a concern broadly held among Democratic state election officials that the Trump administration wants to compile voter data in an effort to influence the upcoming midterm elections. 

The Justice Department, under President Donald Trump, is suing 29 states for refusing to provide voter information. It says it needs the data to evaluate efforts to clean and maintain voter rolls, including whether noncitizens are registered to vote.

But Benson’s brief says that “appears to be a pretext for improper purposes.”

Michigan and other states argue the Trump administration is instead effectively building a nationwide voter registration list — a move not authorized under the 1960 Civil Rights Act, a federal law to combat voting discrimination that the Justice Department has cited in demanding states turn over voter data.

“Collecting Michigan’s voter data to conduct its own list maintenance and to use Michigan’s list as part of creating a national voter file is not encompassed within the purpose stated in DOJ’s demand, which is simply ‘to ascertain Michigan’s compliance with the list maintenance requirements’” of federal election laws, Benson’s brief says.

“Moreover, creating a national voter file of U.S. Citizens is beyond any purpose contemplated by the (Civil Rights Act).”

After U.S. District Court Judge Hala Jarbou ruled in February that the Justice Department isn’t entitled to Michigan’s unredacted voter list containing driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, the department appealed to the 6th Circuit.

Trump priority

Over the past year, Trump has attempted to exercise greater power over federal elections, which, under the U.S. Constitution, are run by the states.

“Trump does not have the authority to create a Trump voter list,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat whom the Justice Department is suing for not providing voter data, said in an interview earlier this month.

Studies have shown noncitizen voting is extremely rare, though Trump has long fixated on the prospect of noncitizen voting and other forms of election fraud. Last year, Trump signed an executive order that would have unilaterally required voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The order was struck down in court, but Trump is pressuring the U.S. Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement similar proof of citizenship rules.

Michigan state officials and other critics of the Justice Department’s voter data effort point to actions by Trump and remarks by a DOJ attorney as evidence that the Trump administration is already compiling a national voter list.

Trump’s recent executive order to restrict mail-in ballots directs the Department of Homeland Security to build lists of voting-age citizens in each state and then share those lists with state officials. Homeland Security operates a powerful computer system, called SAVE, that can verify citizenship by checking names against information in federal databases.

And at a federal court hearing in Rhode Island in late March, Justice Department Voting Section Acting Chief Eric Neff said his department intends to share voter lists with Homeland Security, according to a transcript. He said DOJ and DHS have already entered into a use agreement to govern the sharing of data, though he didn’t detail its requirements.

Mail ballot order an ‘iceberg’ to DOJ case

A DOJ attorney, James Tucker, has denied any effort to create a national voter file. 

“There is not going to be a national voter registration database,” Tucker said at a hearing in Maine on March 26 — less than a week before Trump signed the executive order.

But David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, likened the Justice Department’s litigation strategy to a legal Titanic and the executive order to an iceberg: The order effectively creating a nationwide voter list could sink a strategy that denies such a goal exists.

“The DOJ … has been trying to assure the courts that this data is not going to be used to create a national voter list,” Becker said during a press briefing this month.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Civil Rights Act argued

The Justice Department has so far failed to persuade any federal judges that it’s entitled to state voter data. Judges have dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuits against California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Oregon. 

At least a dozen states, all Republican led, have voluntarily provided their voter lists. The Justice Department has also reached a settlement agreement with one state, Oklahoma, to obtain its data. 

When Jarbou, a Trump appointee, dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit for Michigan’s voter roll, she ruled that the Civil Rights Act doesn’t require the disclosure of the information. The law, signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, empowered federal officials to investigate state and local discrimination against Black voters.

The law requires states to preserve election records for at least 22 months after a federal election, including any documents that come into the possession of an election official. Jarbou wrote in her decision that the state’s voter registration list is created by election officials but isn’t a document, such as a voter registration application, that comes into their possession.

When the Justice Department filed its brief in March, it argued that Jarbou misinterpreted the Civil Rights Act. “The CRA’s text … does not exclude self-generated documents,” the department’s brief says.

The Justice Department’s appeal of the Michigan loss has advanced the furthest, with state officials filing their brief on Monday. The DOJ has pushed for quick timelines in the appeals, arguing that court rulings are needed ahead of the midterms to ensure the fairness of elections.

Local officials back states

Regardless, 18 local election officials from across the country, including seven in Michigan, on Monday filed a brief in the case arguing that the Justice Department hasn’t provided a legitimate basis to obtain election records under the Civil Rights Act.

As election misinformation has proliferated in recent years, local election officials face increasing requests for information, the group wrote. They are accustomed to providing public voter registration information, with steps in place to exclude sensitive, nonpublic data.

Courts act as a “backstop” to enforce bans on disclosing sensitive information in response to records requests from the public, the local election officials argue.

“Courts should perform that same function for requests for records under the CRA,” the group said.