‘Deeply Disturbing’: Trump’s Bid To Run Elections Collides With ICE’s Rampage In Minnesota

After a Border Patrol officer shot and killed Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi presented Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz with a chance to, in her words, “restore the rule of law” and “end the chaos in Minnesota.”

The letter Bondi sent to Walz, a Democrat, read like a ransom note. Among the demands? That the state immediately turn over its entire voter file to the Department of Justice to “confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.”

That request was “deeply disturbing,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told HuffPost.

“The request about handing over voter rolls has nothing to do whatsoever with what’s going on in Minnesota,” Simon said.

The letter is the most concrete link between three of the driving authoritarian urges of President Donald Trump’s second term, tying together his desire for a mass deportation campaign with little respect for the rule of law; his push to punish dissent and protesters like Pretti, who was observing ICE activity when he was shot; and his desire to seize control of the nation’s decentralized election system or, as he has quipped, “cancel the election.”

The demand provided a new face on the administration’s assault on Minneapolis and any future municipality that does not bend the knee: comply with Trump’s orders — including ones courts might otherwise deem illegal — if you want the violent paramilitary to leave.

Minnesota has already rejected Bondi’s demands.

“The answer to her request is no,” Simon said. “And we don’t appreciate this ransom note for the state of Minnesota, implying that the price of our security and freedom and stability is to hand over private, personal voter data in violation of state and federal law.”

But this isn’t likely to be the last such demand. The Justice Department began requesting such voter registration data from states in June 2025 — a total that now reaches 44 states and Washington, D.C., including Minnesota, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Eleven states, all run by Republicans, stated they would comply, while the other states, including many run by Republicans, refused, noting that it would be illegal for them to hand over such sensitive data and privacy concerns about what the data would be used for, or simply provided their publicly available voter file. In response, the Justice Department sued 23 states and D.C., including Minnesota and several led by Republicans like Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire, to get a court to require that they hand over the data.

One reason why Bondi has now tied demands for this data to the administration’s roving assaults on municipalities run by Democrats is that those lawsuits aren’t going well. On Jan. 14, a federal judge issued a rare ruling from the bench dismissing the Justice Department’s case against Oregon. The next day, another federal judge issued a scathing opinion dismissing the case against California while calling the request “unprecedented and illegal.” A third case against Georgia was dismissed by a federal judge for being filed in the wrong jurisdiction on Jan. 23.

In its court filings, the administration claimed that it could obtain these voter records because it needed to see if states were complying with requirements in the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act around voter file maintenance. The administration also argued that the Civil Rights Act allowed it to obtain any election record to determine if a state was complying with federal laws protecting the right to vote.

In court, Justice Department lawyers have refused to provide any reason that they need the voter file data or what they will do with it.

“At no point have they said either we have reason to believe that they are violating any federal law, including HAVA or the NVRA, nor have they said we are investigating a violation of the right to vote,” said Elisabeth Frost, an attorney with Elias Law Group, which represents groups and individuals who have joined the voter file cases on the side of the states.

But statements by the department and its top officials make clear that the department will hand over the data to the Department of Homeland Security to scan for potential noncitizens or use it for other immigration enforcement-related purposes. This could result in the removal of 100,000 voters from the rolls, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said on Newsmax in December.

While this may remove the infinitesimally small number of noncitizens who have registered to vote, it will also purge large numbers of U.S. citizens who are legally registered. This has happened in state after state where elected officials try to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls, and it has already happened to citizens from the states that are complying with Trump’s request for full voter file data.

The administration could also undermine future elections by using this data to enable the mass challenging of voters’ registrations akin to what the election-denying group True The Vote did in Georgia in 2020.

“If they can amass this information, what they want to do with it is kind of like a DOGE database thing where they put it all and what spits out of it are a bunch of different names of people that they’re going to say should not be voting,” Frost said.

This would be the most immediate use the administration would put to state voter files, but it likely wouldn’t be the only one. The requests come as Trump has sought to seize control of elections from the states through a series of executive orders that purported to unilaterally alter election laws. This despite the Constitution placing the power of regulating elections in the hands of the states and Congress, not the president.

“It’s just one additional example of the all-out assault we’re seeing on the right of states to run elections and more broadly than that on all the mechanisms that make democracy work,” said Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, who is a Democrat. “It really adds up to a president and an administration that does not want to have free and fair elections.”

And there are far more dangerous ways that state voter file data could be used to undermine free and fair elections.

“You can’t turn your eyes away from what’s happening in Minneapolis and the news reporting that’s coming out of there,” Frost said. “ICE is using data from all kinds of sources to try to track people. The state voter registration records hold a wealth of information about Americans that is much, much more up to date than what the federal government has. It also holds a lot of information about how often people vote. You could use it to target people who are more likely to vote for parties you would not like them to be voting for.”

Bondi’s mob-like offer to Minnesota — if it had been accepted — could have then been used to further accelerate the administration’s authoritarian immigration enforcement campaigns of retribution. This leaves those in charge of elections having to treat the federal government as a potential threat.

With the Trump administration seemingly in a strategic retreat from the state, the immediate threat to Minnesota may be fading. But Simon said election officials need to prepare for the previously unthinkable.

“It makes a lot of people nervous about the elections this November,” Simon said. “Our office is actively planning for scenarios that might involve direct or indirect interference with the administration of elections by the federal government.”