A senior privacy official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has resigned as the department pushes to collect detailed state voter registration records and share them with the Department of Homeland Security. Kilian Kagle, who served as the division’s chief FOIA officer and senior component privacy official, left his post recently; his resignation was confirmed but had not been reported earlier.
DOJ has sought voter-roll data from most states for more than a year, requesting sensitive personally identifiable information such as driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses, and in some requests party affiliation and voting history. The department says the data are needed to evaluate whether states properly maintain voter rolls and remove ineligible registrants, and it has sued more than two dozen states that resisted handing over records.
At a recent hearing in Rhode Island, DOJ voting-section officials said the department intends to share collected voter-roll data with DHS and run it through DHS’s SAVE system to identify potential noncitizens and deceased individuals. DHS-flagged cases may be referred to other agencies for follow-up, and USCIS has said SAVE referrals can be sent to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations.
The effort has prompted pushback from privacy experts, advocates and federal judges. Judges in California, Oregon and Michigan have so far dismissed DOJ demands in several cases, concluding the federal government was not entitled to the records under the law and underscoring states’ constitutional authority to administer elections. In California, a federal judge found DOJ’s demand violated federal privacy statutes and state privacy law.
Privacy advocates also say DOJ failed to follow required procedures for handling new personally identifiable information. Federal rules generally require agencies to issue public notices and privacy impact assessments before collecting or disseminating PII for new purposes; critics including the Electronic Privacy Information Center say DOJ has not publicly issued the necessary documentation related to the voter data effort. EPIC’s deputy director called the collection an unlawful abuse of sensitive voter data.
DOJ reports it has received voter rolls from 17 mostly Republican-led states. At the Rhode Island hearing DOJ attorneys said the department had not yet used the collected data and that additional steps would be needed before DOJ could claim compliance with the Privacy Act. Former DOJ officials and legal scholars have criticized the fact that the department already possesses the information without public notice or transparency about its storage and intended uses, warning of heightened security and misuse risks.
DOJ attorneys have sought to reassure courts about security, noting the Civil Rights Division has not experienced a data breach and asserting planned sharing would comply with federal privacy law; agency privacy staff are reportedly working on the implementation plan. Still, legal and privacy advocates say compiling state voter records into a federal system without the required notices, assessments and clear limits on use raises significant statutory and constitutional concerns and increases the risk that sensitive information could be exposed or misused.
Kagle’s departure is part of a broader pattern of privacy, FOIA and civil-rights staff exits across agencies during the administration. High-profile departures and controversies at other agencies — including past resignations tied to data-sharing disputes at the IRS and Social Security Administration — are cited by observers as evidence of wider tensions over federal data practices and safeguards.