Bondi Demands Minnesota Voter Rolls, Welfare Records and ICE Cooperation in One Letter to Gov. Walz

Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a three-page letter dated January 24, 2026 to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the day Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, making three demands under the heading of ending “the chaos in Minnesota”: (1) share all of Minnesota’s Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service (including SNAP) records with the federal government, to investigate fraud; (2) repeal sanctuary policies, with state detention facilities to cooperate with ICE, honor detainers and let ICE interview detainees; and (3) let the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division access voter rolls “to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.” The letter links fraud to elections in one sentence (“the out of control fraud in your state also implicates election security”). It does not say ICE would use the voter rolls or the public-assistance data, and it does not say ICE would leave if the state complied; Sen. Chris Murphy said it did, and DOJ called that a lie. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon’s statement dated January 25 says the request “came via letter on January 24, 2026, to Governor Tim Walz.” The press cycle ran January 26 (the Raskin letter to DOJ, DOJ’s reply to Murphy), which is where the earlier January 26 date of this entry came from.

The request came during ongoing protests against ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which had included the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent on January 7, and it belongs to DOJ’s nationwide campaign to obtain full voter registration lists from states, including partial Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, birth dates, names, and addresses. DOJ had filed lawsuits against 24 states and the District of Columbia for failing to provide the data. A federal court had already dismissed DOJ’s lawsuit to compel California’s voter rolls in January 2026.

The juxtaposition is the documented fact: one letter pairing a data demand on voter rolls and welfare records with a demand for state cooperation with ICE, sent the day of a federal agent killing. Whether DOJ meant the data to serve immigration enforcement is not established by the letter’s text. Critics, including Murphy, read the letter as conditioning an end to the ICE surge on the data; the text does not contain that condition. The archived copy is the PDF hosted by Fox News; no Walz-office or DOJ-hosted original was found (see bondi-walz-minnesota-letter-text-and-date-2026-10-08).