Minnesota Gov. Walz appears unimpressed by Pam Bondi’s demands
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Monday confirmed to the press that he received a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi over the weekend demanding that the state better cooperate with federal immigration authorities and that it hand over its voter registration lists and safety-net benefits data. Whether the nation’s chief law enforcement officer should expect the governor to bend to her demands was perhaps made clear by his rejoinder: “There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.”
Bondi’s letter on Saturday described Operation Metro Surge, the name Immigration and Customs Enforcement gives its Minnesota activities, as an urgent effort “to protect Americans from the dangers presented by unchecked illegal immigration, including violent crime,” but that has received scant support from local law enforcement, detention centers, officials or residents. She recalled that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE during a recent press conference that it should “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
Even before Saturday, when ICE agents fatally shot Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care nurse with no criminal record, Frey had observed that the presence of aggressive federal immigration authorities had put his city’s inhabitants on edge. John Freude, the mayor’s public safety adviser, told The New Yorker that the office received 15,000 messages in the first ten days after Jan. 7, the day ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot the writer and poet Renee Good while she was driving away from him. (A Jan. 10 investigation published by the Wall Street Journal found 13 instances of agents having fired at or into civilian vehicles since last July, leading to eight people shot and two dead.)
In her letter, Bondi drew a relationship between the state’s strong anti-ICE sentiment, the prevalence of fraud in Minnesota, such as the schemes taking advantage of the state’s safety-net benefits programs, and a potential compromise of the state’s elections: “The lawlessness in the streets is matched by the unprecedented financial fraud occurring on your watch. The out of control fraud in your state also implicates election security.”
To back the latter claim, Bondi cited an illegal scheme conducted in 2021 and 2022 by two Nevada residents who filled out hundreds of Minnesota voter registration cards with phony names and other information. The scheme was detected by Minnesota officials and forwarded to the FBI. One of the fraudsters last June pled guilty to a charge of conspiracy to engage in voter registration fraud.
Bondi wrote that Walz and his office “must restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” and then supplied what she called “common sense solutions to these problems.” Her solutions total up to Minnesota sharing Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service program data with the federal government, repealing sanctuary policies that “have led to so much crime and violence in your state,” ensuring that detention facilities fully cooperate with ICE, and allowing the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division access to voter rolls “that confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.”
The attorney general’s final demand contains a legal strategy being used by her department in pursuing voter data not only in Minnesota, but in many states. (According to researchers at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit “dedicated to the rule of law and free, fair, secure elections,” the DOJ has filed lawsuits against 24 states and Washington, D.C., in its pursuit of voter data.) A federal district court judge in California this month dismissed a DOJ lawsuit that sought the state’s unredacted voter rolls, ruling that the department’s attempts to use the Civil Rights Act, as well as the Help America Vote Act, were “contrived” and lacked legal weight. The judge, David O. Carter, also in his decision said he was concerned with the federal government’s ongoing attempt to consolidate the nation’s federated elections powers: “This is antithetical to the promise of fair and free elections our country promises and the franchise that civil rights leaders fought and died for.”
Carter isn’t alone in his worry that the Trump administration is ravaging the rule of law. The Democracy Forward Foundation, a Washington nonprofit that provides legal services and conducts public-policy research, on Monday released a statement calling Bondi’s letter a “troubling” attempt to “extort” a state’s chief executive. Skye Perryman, the group’s president, said federal activity in Minnesota “is not about immigration or protests, it is about an autocratic power grab. It looks like they are heading for our elections.”
Walz on Monday told the press that he spoke on the phone with President Donald Trump about the possibility of reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota, and insisted that the Department of Homeland Security allow state officials to lead the investigation into Saturday’s fatal shooting. Trump wrote on Truth Social that it was “a very good call,” in which the two agreed that Tom Homan, a former ICE director who serves as Trump’s border czar, will travel to the state.
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, titled “The Un-American Assault on Minnesota,” Walz lambasted the Trump administration’s activity in Minnesota, which, he noted, has included abducting children, separating children from their parents, racially profiling off-duty police officers and aggressively pulling over residents and demanding to see their papers. Stories of small children separated from their parents, which have gone viral online this month, must have especially rankled the governor, who’s repeatedly boasted about policies under his administration that have made Minnesota “the best state to raise a family.”
“They have broken into the homes of elderly citizens without warrants to drag them outside in freezing temperatures,” Walz wrote. “That isn’t effective law enforcement. It isn’t following the rule of law. It’s chaos. It’s illegal. And it’s un-American.”
Walz also accused the Trump administration of getting “its facts wrong” about Minnesota, including a claim that the state’s jails release “the worst of the worst” onto the streets without cooperating with federal officials. The governor wrote that “there is not a single documented case of the [state corrections department] releasing someone from state prison without offering to ensure a smooth transfer of custody.”
He debunked the Trump administration’s claim that 1,360 noncitizens are in Minnesota prisons. (The total state prison population is 8,000, he wrote, and contains 207 noncitizens.) Walz also pointed out that ICE is taking credit for arrests made by state and local law enforcement before the federal operation even began, in an attempt to boost its numbers.
In an online presentation to reporters on Monday, Joanna Lydgate, a former deputy attorney general in Massachusetts who now heads the States United Democracy Center, said that latent, illiberal threats to United States elections were activated by Trump after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, but have only continued to become more dangerous. Trump has repeated the lie that he won that election countless times, most recently on Monday, when he posted on Truth Social, incorrectly, that he’d “won in a Landslide.” The latest telling of the lie was wrapped in a rant about inaccurate polling results, which he said “should be, virtually, a criminal offense.”
“The president’s lies about the 2020 election kickstarted an entire movement, the election denial movement,” Lydgate said. “We’ve watched many candidates run on that platform and we’ve watched him of course expand it over the years. And of course today five years later that election denial movement is really embedded in our federal government, in the White House, in our federal agencies and in our certain states across the country, as well.”
Lydgate said this year is proving different than past ones because people who believe in false election conspiracy theories are now shaping “real policies.” She pointed to a Trump executive order last year that called for stronger citizenship checks and pooh-poohed postal voting. She warned that Trump may try to use executive power “in the 11th hour” to interfere with the upcoming election, and said that “if this sounds like an all-out assault on our democracy by the Trump administration, that’s because it is. They are definitely laying the groundwork to try to interfere with the election if they aren’t happy with the results.”
Many state leaders — governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general — have been pushing back against what they view is an overreach of federal authority. According to States United researchers, states have filed at least 65 lawsuits against the federal government during the second Trump administration, on everything from birthright citizenship to tariffs. But Trump loyalists, too, can also be found inside state governments, including in places like Alabama and Texas.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen last week touted a recent grand jury indictment against a noncitizen, identified by his office, who’s accused of felony voter fraud. Franc Neil Maloney, a foreign national from Canada, is charged with unlawfully voting in nine state or federal elections. In a press conference on Friday, Pamela Casey, the district attorney of Blount County, said the charges date back to 2017, and include a charge that Maloney voted in the 2024 general election. Casey said Maloney had already been out of jail, on bond, for a case involving 187 counts of child sexual abuse material, and four counts of distributing such material. But the charges of “child pornography,” Casey made clear, “were in no way connected to the charges of felony voter fraud.”
