This piece was originally published by Capitol News Illinois, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government.
The Trump administration’s lawsuits seeking access to sensitive voter registration data in Illinois and dozens of other states is one part of a broader effort to purge state voter rolls of suspected noncitizens, according to documents filed recently in federal court in Springfield.
Those documents were filed on April 30, by attorneys representing the Illinois AFL-CIO and other groups that have intervened in the case seeking to prevent the Department of Justice from obtaining the information. They say it proves the agency’s stated reasons for seeking the data — to determine whether Illinois is complying with voter list maintenance requirements — is only a pretext and the agency’s suit against the state should be dismissed.
Several former DOJ attorneys who have worked in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief in the case in March, arguing the agency has no statutory authority to seek the information to conduct its own list maintenance program or to identify noncitizens.
The materials include internal DOJ emails that the attorneys say were made available “in response to a public records request lawsuit.”
One of those was a June 16, 2025, email from Michael Gates, who was then a deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, to his superior, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees that division. In that email, Gates states that the division is seeking access to the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
“This will be helpful to us because it will allow us to compare this SAVE database against states’ voter rolls, which we will get directly from states under the (National Voter Registration Act),” Gates wrote.
The next month, on July 28, DOJ sent its first letter to the Illinois State Board of Elections seeking access to Illinois’ complete, unredacted statewide voter registration list, indicating that it was part of DOJ’s efforts to enforce voter list maintenance provisions of NVRA. The letter was signed by Gates. It also bore the name of Maureen Riordan, acting chief of the Voting Section within the Civil Rights Division.
Gates has since left the Justice Department. He is currently a Republican candidate for California attorney general in that state’s upcoming June 2 primary.
The SAVE database was originally set up to help states verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for public benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Some states also use it to verify people’s eligibility to vote.
But the program has also been the target of criticism because of its tendency to misidentify people as noncitizens due to its use of incomplete or inaccurate data.
Peter Hancock is statehouse reporter for Capitol News Illinois.