States Carry the Torch

This Week in Democracy

• The Trump administration is continuing its attempts to take control over elections—an idea that directly contradicts the Constitution, which gives states the power to run elections. President Trump said in interviews that his party should “take over” and “nationalize” elections, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to rule out the possibility that federal immigration agents could be at polling places in November.

  But courts are continuing to check the administration, including last week when a federal judge blocked it from imposing new requirements around registering to vote or applying for an absentee ballot. It’s the latest ruling to block parts of Trump’s election-focused executive order.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About Federal Overreach of States’ Authority to Administer Elections

• Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, sued the federal government, demanding that officials return 2020 election materials seized by the FBI last week. The complaint also challenges the legality of the warrant that authorized the FBI’s search.

  The county officials said that the warrant authorized the FBI to make copies of records, but that agents instead took original ballots and voter rolls. “Now we cannot verify that we’ve received everything back because there was no chain-of-custody inventory taken at the time the records were seized,” said Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About the Trump Administration’s 2020 Election Investigation

• As protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations continue in Minnesota, White House Border Czar Tom Homan announced that 700 federal agents would be withdrawn from the state.

  The surge of agents—estimated to include 3,000 at its peak, compared to Minneapolis’s police force of 600—preceded the killings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, last month. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the local prosecutor investigating Good’s killing, sent a formal demand for evidence this week to the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). (Federal officials previously shut out state officials from their investigation, leading Moriarty and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to launch their own.)

  Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, a member of States United’s Bipartisan Advisory Board, spoke to Politico Magazine about how she sees her former department being mismanaged. “I can go through 10 things in Minneapolis that escalated the situation,” she said.

State of the States

In New York, Attorney General Letitia James announced an initiative that will send trained observers to monitor federal immigration operations in her state. The observers will collect information and document events as they happen, to allow James’s office to identify any violations of the law.

“As Attorney General, I am proud to protect New Yorkers’ constitutional rights to speak freely, protest peacefully, and go about their lives without fear of unlawful federal action,” James said in a statement. “We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability. My office is launching the Legal Observation Project to examine federal enforcement activity in New York and whether it remains within the bounds of the law.”

In Oregon, a judge restricted federal agents from using certain crowd-control tools against peaceful protestors and journalists in Portland. The judge found that there was “more than enough evidence” that agents used “persistent, excessive, and targeted violence” against people exercising their First Amendment rights.

“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated,” the judge wrote.

“Rather than reprimanding DHS violence against protesters, senior officials have publicly condoned it,” he added. “There are clear instances of excessive force … Yet, the agents involved were not put on leave and do not appear to have been held accountable in any way.”

➡️ READ: What’s Breaking Through About Federal Law Enforcement Tactics

Watch This

States United Program Director Sam Trepel—a former attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who led the federal prosecution of the officers who murdered George Floyd—spoke to CBS’s “60 Minutes” about how her former office should be handling the investigations into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Click here to watch the full segment.