Independent Sen. Angus King calls the “worst of the worst” targeting a pretext for mass deportation.
PORTLAND, Maine — Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is denouncing a maneuver by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi seeming to pressure Minnesota to take submissive actions as a condition for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge into that Midwestern state to be curtailed.
In an interview with NEWS CENTER Maine on Sunday, Bellows described the Bondi letter as “ransom” and vowed Maine would not cave into such a tactic.
Bondi wrote Minnesota Governor Tim Walz a three-page on Saturday, urging him to take three actions to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.”
Bondi said Minnesota should:
Turn over all of Minnesota’s records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs to federal fraud investigators.Repeal the sanctuary policies that limit state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration probes, including allowing ICE agents to interview detainees in local jails.Allow the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to access state voter rolls.
“I am confident that these simple steps will help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans. The time has come for state and local officials in your state to change course,” Bondi wrote Walz. “Minnesota can and should be a partner with this administration.”
Minnesota Secretary of State rejected the voter roll demand in Bondi’s letter, writing: “The answer to Attorney General Bondi’s request is no.”
“As Maine’s top election official, I stand with Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon,” Bellows said in the interview.
“The Attorney General’s letter to Minnesota makes it very clear that ICE is invading Minnesota and Maine to create chaos and to control our states and our elections,” Bellows said. “Let me say this very clearly for President Trump and Attorney General Bondi: Maine will never turn over our voter rolls as a ransom payment to get ICE out of our state.”
Bellows, a Democratic candidate for governor, was among a group of political leaders and hundreds of people who attended an anti-ICE rally in Lewiston on Saturday following this week’s surge of ICE agents into Maine that has led to more than 100 arrests since its Operation Catch of the Day began on Tuesday, Jan. 20.
Bellows said in the interview, “The idea that the U.S. Attorney General would send a letter to Minnesota and condition getting ICE out of Minnesota on release of the voter data, thereby control of state elections, is completely contrary to the Constitution and the rule of law.”
Bellows said neither her office nor the Maine governor’s office had received a letter like the one Bondi sent Walz.
“And I’m here to say Maine is never turning over the voter file to the federal government and certainly not as a condition of getting ICE agents out of our streets,” Bellows said.
The Trump administration has already sued Maine to turn over its raw voter rolls—a request Bellows rejected months ago, as have 26 other states, including Minnesota. Maine has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which is expected to be argued in court in March. Three resistant states—California, Oregon, and Georgia—have won favorable court rulings.
Bellows said, “Our Founders under the Constitution designed our system whereby states and local governments, not the federal government, oversee elections to safeguard us from exactly this—from tyranny by the federal government. This is an assault on our freedoms. It’s creating chaos in our states. ICE needs to get out of Maine now.”
As of Sunday, on its newly launched “worst of the worst” website that is searchable by state, the Department of Homeland Security had posted mug shots of 13 individuals (with names, country of origin, and criminal charges) arrested in Maine, but the website did not list their dates of arrest. The Maine pages also omitted the first four individuals who DHS announced on Jan. 21 had been detained at the start of the Maine surge, including a man convicted of driving under the influence.
“This ‘worst of the worst’ thing is a pretext. What they’re really doing is going after people who are here—they’re asylum seekers, they’re in the process, they have green cards. We’ve had numerous cases in Maine of people being stopped and detained with zero criminal record,” Maine independent U.S. Senator Angus King said on CBS “Face The Nation” on Sunday. “Here’s what’s happening in Portland. People are afraid to send their kids to school. People are afraid to go to work. Businesses are suffering because their workers can’t come in. Families are sending food to their friends who are afraid to come out. That’s the real impact of this.”
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