A key privacy officer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has resigned just days after the agency disclosed its intention to share sensitive voter registration data with the Department of Homeland Security, NPR reported Thursday.
Kilian Kagle, who served as chief FOIA officer and senior component official for privacy for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, left his post in recent days, according to sources familiar with the matter. His resignation has not been previously reported.
Kagle declined NPR’s request to comment but confirmed he had recently resigned. He issued a privacy impact assessment for an unrelated DOJ case management database as recently as March 20.
The timing raises questions about internal concerns over the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to collect voter rolls from states across the country. So far, 17 mostly Republican-led states have turned over their voter rolls to the Justice Department, according to the agency. Yet DOJ has not issued any public notices or privacy assessments about this new data collection, nor its plans to share the data with DHS.
Federal privacy laws require such documents before a federal agency collects or disseminates personal, identifiable information about the public for a new purpose. The documents are typically issued in collaboration with the agency or division’s designated privacy officer.
Last week, Eric Neff, acting chief of the Justice Department’s voting section, said at a hearing in Rhode Island that his agency’s intent is to share state voter roll data with the Department of Homeland Security and run it through a DHS data system called SAVE to check for noncitizens and deceased individuals on the rolls.
The revelation came during a federal court hearing in which Rhode Island is challenging DOJ’s demand for voter data. The Justice Department has been trying to force states to hand over sensitive voter data that it plans to share with the Department of Homeland Security.
The DOJ’s voter data collection effort has faced significant legal challenges. While the DOJ’s cases are still pending in most states, federal judges in California, Oregon and Michigan have so far dismissed the DOJ’s demands for sensitive state voter data, finding that the federal government was not entitled to the records under the law.
In the California case, U.S. District Judge David Carter specifically noted in his January ruling that DOJ’s demand violated various federal privacy laws, as well as California state privacy law, a concern that has also been raised by states and privacy experts.
Privacy advocates have condemned the data collection as illegal. “The Department of Justice has no legal authority to maintain a massive database of state voter records in the first place,” said John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s an unlawful and inexcusable abuse of sensitive voter data, and no amount of artful paperwork can fix that. Still, it’s telling that DOJ hasn’t even gone through the motions yet of publishing basic privacy documentation required by law.”
The scope of the data requests has been extensive. Since last year, the Justice Department has made unprecedented demands to states for sensitive voter data, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. In some cases, like in California, the demands went further, to include party affiliation and voting history.
DOJ has sued more than two dozen states that have not turned over their voter lists. The agency has defended its actions by saying it needs this data to ensure states are performing voter list maintenance and removing ineligible registrants.
However, critics argue the effort is part of a broader pattern. The Justice Department’s efforts to acquire this voter data come as the Trump administration is investigating 2020 election results and continues to elevate unfounded conspiracy theories about the prevalence of election fraud, which has been shown to be rare.
The constitutional issues at stake are significant. Under the Constitution, states administer their own elections, and voter data has always belonged to the states.
Privacy expert Justin Levitt raised additional concerns about the data collection. Levitt said each of the 17 state voter rolls with sensitive information that have been collected by the DOJ so far represents “a criminal violation.” “I don’t think DOJ has lawfully explained to the public or to Congress basic data management, basic data systems analysis questions about the compilation of new data systems on Americans — as is required by statute,” Levitt said. He also said there are security concerns with how the federal government would store this volume of sensitive information and protect it from a data breach.
When confronted about security concerns, DOJ officials have downplayed the risks. In the same Rhode Island hearing, Neff dismissed concerns about hackers accessing the data held by the Civil Rights Division and told the judge, “We have yet to have a data breach in our history.”
The controversy has also touched on potential misconduct by former Trump administration officials. The agency announced that two former DOGE staffers were referred to a watchdog for possible Hatch Act violations after the agency discovered they communicated with a political advocacy group about matching Social Security numbers with voter roll data in an attempt to find evidence of voter fraud. Last month, the agency’s inspector general told members of Congress it was reviewing an anonymous complaint with new allegations that