As the Justice Department moves to collect sensitive state voter registration data and has disclosed plans to share it with the Department of Homeland Security, a senior privacy official in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has resigned.
Kilian Kagle, who served as the Civil Rights Division’s chief FOIA officer and senior component privacy official, left his post in recent days, his resignation confirmed but not previously reported. The departure comes amid DOJ’s yearlong effort to obtain detailed voter records from most states — including driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses — and, in some requests, party affiliation and voting history.
DOJ says the data are needed to assess whether states are properly maintaining voter rolls and removing ineligible registrants. The department has sued more than two dozen states that resisted turning over their lists. At a recent hearing in Rhode Island, Eric Neff, acting chief of DOJ’s voting section, said the department intends to share state voter roll data with DHS and run it through DHS’s SAVE system to identify potential noncitizens and deceased individuals.
Privacy experts and several federal judges have pushed back. Federal judges in California, Oregon and Michigan have dismissed DOJ’s demands in cases so far, finding the federal government not entitled to the records under law and emphasizing states’ constitutional authority to administer elections. In California, U.S. District Judge David Carter wrote that DOJ’s demand violated federal privacy statutes and California state privacy law.
Advocates say DOJ has not followed required privacy procedures. John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), called DOJ’s effort “an unlawful and inexcusable abuse of sensitive voter data,” and noted DOJ had not published basic privacy documentation required by law. Federal statutes require agencies to issue public notices and privacy impact assessments before collecting or disseminating personally identifiable information for new purposes; DOJ has not publicly issued such documents related to the voter data collection or its planned sharing with DHS.
DOJ reports it has received voter rolls from 17 mostly Republican-led states. Kagle declined to comment to NPR but confirmed his resignation and had recently authored a privacy impact assessment for an unrelated DOJ case management database on March 20. At the Rhode Island hearing, Neff said DOJ had not yet used the collected voter data, noting there were “a couple steps we have to go through” before DOJ could represent compliance with the Privacy Act to a court. Still, former DOJ official and law professor Justin Levitt said it is problematic that DOJ already possesses the data without providing public notice or transparency about its use and storage, and he warned of security risks in housing such a volume of sensitive information.
Neff downplayed data-breach concerns, telling the judge the Civil Rights Division had “yet to have a data breach in our history,” and insisted the plan to share data with DHS would comply with federal privacy law. He said DOJ acting Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer Peter Winn was working on the plan. When U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy asked whether the data could be used by ICE to arrest people, Neff replied the Civil Rights Division could not promise what other agencies might do; he later clarified the data “is not being used for immigration purposes.” But USCIS has said voters flagged by DHS’s SAVE system as potential noncitizens are referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for follow-up.
The DOJ effort coincides with other administration actions. An executive order signed this week directing limits on mail-in voting also tasks DHS with producing a list of eligible voters in each state — a move many legal experts expect will face court challenges.
Kagle’s resignation is part of a broader pattern of departures among privacy, FOIA and civil rights staff across the federal government. Many career employees have left DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under this administration, and privacy experts describe an “exodus” from other agencies as well. High-profile departures and disputes include the resignation last year of Melanie Krause, the former acting IRS commissioner, amid the agency’s data-sharing agreement with ICE that courts later blocked; and Charles Borges, the former chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, who resigned and became a whistleblower over concerns about data practices involving sensitive Social Security information.
Since Borges’ departure, the SSA said two former staffers were referred to a watchdog for possible Hatch Act violations after they were found to have communicated with a political advocacy group about matching Social Security numbers to voter rolls to seek evidence of voter fraud. Separately, the agency’s inspector general told Congress it was reviewing an anonymous complaint with new allegations that a former Department of Government Efficiency employee may have misused Social Security data.
Legal and privacy advocates say DOJ’s compilation of voter records into a federal system—absent required privacy notices, assessments, and clear limits on use—raises statutory and constitutional concerns and increases the risk that Americans’ sensitive information could be misused or exposed.