Trump is Handing Your Voter Data to Homeland Security

Also: ICE's largest detention center was a no-bid contract, and good news from Utah and Wisconsin this week

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my coffee, and I have a lot to catch you up on this week.

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The Story Nobody Is Talking About: The DOJ Is Building a Voter Database and Handing It to DHS

The Iran war is consuming the oxygen of every newsroom in America. That’s a problem, because while everyone watches the war, something is happening at home that could permanently alter American democracy.

For nearly a year, the Justice Department has been demanding sensitive voter data from states. Not just names and addresses, but driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, and dates of birth. When states refused, the DOJ sued them. Trump’s DOJ has now sued more than 30 states. Twelve — mostly red — have complied, handing over the private information of every registered voter in their state.

This week, at a hearing in Rhode Island, the DOJ revealed for the first time what it actually intends to do with this data: share it with the Department of Homeland Security and run it through an immigration database called SAVE. This isn’t a voter maintenance program. It’s an immigration enforcement tool being built on top of voter data.

The DOJ is building a national voter database containing the Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers of tens of millions of Americans and handing it to the same agency conducting mass deportation raids.

Also this week: NPR reported that the chief FOIA officer and senior privacy official for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division quietly resigned. His name is Kilian Kagle. His exit follows a pattern of privacy and civil rights officials leaving as the administration pursues data-sharing arrangements that legal experts call unconstitutional.

Courts in California, Michigan, and Oregon have dismissed the DOJ’s cases. The administration is appealing all three. Steve Bannon has been unusually honest about what this is really for. This week he described ICE’s presence in airports as a “test run” for having ICE agents at polling places. “They’re trained to check IDs,” he said. “That’s perfect training for the fall of 2026.”

This isn’t paranoia. This is the architecture of voter suppression being built in plain sight, while everyone watches the war in Iran.

ICE: A No-Bid Contract for the Largest Detention Center Yields Horrific Results

A government inspection of Camp East Montana — the largest immigration detention center in America, on a military base outside El Paso — found 49 violations of national detention standards. The inspection was conducted in February and posted publicly this week.

The violations include 22 related to use of force and restraints, failures to document suicide prevention checks, failure to quarantine a detainee with suspected tuberculosis, and inadequate medical care. Three people have died at the facility since it opened last August. The company that ran it, Acquisition Logistics, had never operated a detention center before.

For this facility, they received a $1.3 billion no-bid contract. (Once again, they’ve never operated a detention center before.)

One former detainee, Owen Ramsingh, told NPR he heard guards running a betting pool on which detainee would die by suicide next. Ramsingh was held for four months before being deported. He claimed he personally talked three people out of killing themselves. Guards laughed when detainees beat on the windows yelling that they were being killed, he said.

“When they say in the news that this is the worst facility in the country,” he added, “they damn right.”

The facility houses approximately 3,000 people per day. The majority have no major criminal history. DHS, in a statement, said the agency “inherited the contract.”

If this reporting on ICE matters to you, please consider upgrading your subscription today. We are going to keep covering this every single week until this changes.

Democrats Are About to Pick Up a Seat in Utah. And Wisconsin Could Lock In a Decade of Voting Rights Protection.

Federal courts this week upheld Utah’s new congressional map, drawn by an independent redistricting commission, rejecting multiple Republican attempts to block it. The map creates a Democratic-leaning district that didn’t exist before.

A year ago, a Democratic pickup in Utah seemed like a fantasy. Today, it’s the likely outcome. One more seat in the House. One more vote against everything we’ve been writing about this week.

And then there’s Tuesday.

Wisconsin holds a Supreme Court election next week. Democrat-backed Chris Taylor holds a clear fundraising and ad-spending advantage. A Taylor win would expand the liberal majority from 4-3 to 5-2, potentially putting the court out of conservative reach for the rest of the decade.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has the final word on redistricting, abortion rights, and election law in one of America’s most critical battleground states. A 5-2 liberal majority means Wisconsin’s voting maps and reproductive rights protections will be defended by a court that answers to the state’s constitution, not to Donald Trump.

Voting is Tuesday, April 7. If you know people in Wisconsin, tell them.

What This All Means to Me

I founded Raw Story because someone had to say plainly what the mainstream press wouldn’t. Twenty years ago, it was that the Bush administration lied us into a war.

Today the cover-up looks different but the impulse is the same. The DOJ is building a secret voter database and handing it to the deportation agency while its own privacy officer quietly walks out the door. Guards at America’s largest detention facility are allegedly betting on which detainee will die by suicide next. The architecture of voter suppression for the 2026 midterms is being assembled in plain sight.

Raw America exists because someone has to say it plainly.

Here’s what I’m genuinely excited about: we’re building something that can actually meet this moment. We have a reporter on the ground in Washington. We’re on the verge of partnering with a new Capitol Hill journalist who has extraordinary access to Democratic members of Congress. We are in the rooms.

And we’re growing. But we can’t do it without you.

If this is the journalism you want, the kind that stays on the ICE deaths, voting rights, and everything Trump is hoping the Iran coverage buries — I need you with us. Consider upgrading your subscription today.

If you’re already a subscriber: thank you. You made this possible. Please share this with someone who needs to see the full picture.

— John Byrne

Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

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