Kilian Kagle, the chief FOIA officer and senior privacy official for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has quietly resigned as DOJ moves to collect sensitive state voter registration data and plans to share it with the Department of Homeland Security.
For almost a year, the Civil Rights Division has made broad demands for voter-roll information from most states—seeking driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses. In some requests, including in California, the department sought party affiliation and voting history. DOJ says it needs the data to verify that states are properly maintaining voter rolls and removing ineligible registrants. The department has sued more than two dozen states that refused to hand over their records.
Acting chief of the Justice Department’s voting section Eric Neff told a Rhode Island hearing that DOJ intends to run the state data through DHS’s SAVE system to check for noncitizens and deceased registrants, and that the department plans to share records with DHS. Neff later told the court the data “is not being used for immigration purposes,” but also acknowledged the Civil Rights Division cannot promise what other agencies will do. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has said SAVE referrals flagging potential noncitizens are sent to Homeland Security Investigations for follow-up.
Seventeen states, mostly led by Republicans, have already turned over voter rolls, according to DOJ. But the agency has not published public notices or privacy impact assessments required by federal privacy laws when a new federal data collection or dissemination is created for a new purpose. Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, said DOJ’s possession of these records without public notice or transparency about use and storage violates the Privacy Act and raises security concerns. Levitt has called each of the 17 collected state rolls “a criminal violation.” John Davisson of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said DOJ “has no legal authority to maintain a massive database of state voter records” and criticized the absence of required privacy documentation.
Federal judges in California, Oregon and Michigan have so far rejected DOJ’s demands in cases before them, finding the federal government was not entitled to the records. U.S. District Judge David Carter’s January ruling in the California case said DOJ’s demand violated federal privacy statutes and California law. The rulings reflect a core constitutional principle: states administer their own elections and voter data has historically been state-held.
Neff told the Rhode Island court DOJ has not yet used the data from the 17 states because “there are still a couple steps we have to go through before the United States is comfortable proceeding and comfortable representing to this court that we’re in full compliance with the Privacy Act.” He said DOJ’s acting Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer Peter Winn was working on the plan. Kagle declined to comment to NPR but confirmed his resignation and had recently issued a privacy impact assessment in an unrelated DOJ case management matter on March 20.
The drive to aggregate voter data for cross-agency use comes amid the Trump administration’s continued scrutiny of the 2020 election and repeated, unproven assertions of widespread voter fraud. This week, President Trump issued an executive order aimed at limiting mail-in voting that tasks DHS with compiling lists of eligible voters in each state; many legal experts expect litigation will block parts of the order.
Kagle’s departure is part of a broader exodus of career employees and privacy experts from the Civil Rights Division and other federal agencies during this administration. Other notable departures tied to data-sharing controversies include Melanie Krause, the former acting IRS commissioner, who resigned after the agency entered a data-sharing agreement with ICE that courts later blocked; and Charles Borges, the former chief data officer of the Social Security Administration’s DOGE office, who resigned and became a whistleblower over data practices. Since Borges’s exit, SSA said two former DOGE staffers were referred to a watchdog for possible Hatch Act violations after the agency found they had communicated with a political advocacy group about matching Social Security numbers with voter rolls. The agency’s inspector general is also reviewing an anonymous complaint alleging potential misuse of Social Security data by a former DOGE employee.
Privacy experts and advocates say DOJ’s collection and potential cross-agency dissemination of detailed voter information—without publicly available privacy assessments or clear legal authority—raises significant legal, civil rights and security concerns, and has prompted multiple legal challenges and internal departures.