Federal Pace and Its Refusal
On three fronts at once — data, police, detention — federal enforcement is expanding fast, and on all three it is being refused. Where you live decides which side you're on.
Last spring, letters began arriving at the election offices of nearly every state in the country. They came from the Department of Justice, and they asked for something the federal government had never before tried to assemble: the full voter file of each state — every registered voter’s name, address, date of birth, and the private identifiers states normally guard, down to fragments of Social Security numbers. By this June the demand had reached at least forty-eight states and the District of Columbia.
The voter rolls were one piece of a wider reach for data. In the same months the federal government pulled at tax records, Social Security files, Medicaid enrollment, and the driver’s-license databases kept by the states — each system built for one purpose and asked to serve another: to locate people for suppression.
A line is worth drawing here, because it is the line we work on. Some of that data the federal government already holds — your tax return, your Social Security record — and the fight over how it gets used is a federal one. But much of it is held by the states: their voter rolls, their motor-vehicle records, the files their own agencies keep. That second category is where state law still has a say over who gets in — and it is where the refusal has been strongest. Most of the states that got the voter-roll demand said no, and the refusal did not split along party lines; election officials of both parties declined to hand over their residents’ data. The government sued thirty states to force the question. Eight federal district courts have already dismissed those suits, finding no law requires a state to surrender its voters’ identifiers; the government is appealing. Federal Limits advocates for information firewalls.
The second front: the police
The next front is the police. The program called 287(g) deputizes local officers to carry out federal civil immigration enforcement, and it is growing at a pace with no precedent. The federal roster counted about 1,540 of these agreements in mid-March; by mid-June there were 1,954 — more than four hundred new ones in roughly three months, better than four a day.
States are drawing that line too. Virginia required law-enforcement officers — federal agents included — to identify themselves and barred them from wearing masks on duty, rules the Justice Department says would undo the state’s 287(g) agreements; it has already sued to strike the law down. Rhode Island moved to keep civil immigration arrests out of its courthouses without a judge’s warrant. New York walled off its agencies’ data and required a warrant for federal access to schools and hospitals. California withheld the fifty-five million dollars its own motor-vehicle agency would need to feed driver data into a federally reachable system.
The third front: the buildings
To hold the people this machinery reaches, the federal government has been buying vacant warehouses and converting them into detention centers — more than a billion dollars on roughly a dozen of them across eight states so far, some planned for thousands of beds, many procured through a military contracting channel that bypasses the usual public bidding. The money behind it is both staggering and fresh: this month Congress sent roughly seventy billion dollars more to immigration enforcement — on top of the roughly one hundred seventy billion it appropriated a year ago, the largest such appropriation in the nation’s history.
Here too the answer has been no — and not only from courts. In Oklahoma City, residents filled a council meeting until the warehouse’s owners walked away from the sale. In Kansas City, weeks of organizing pushed a developer to pull out and the local port authority to cut ties. A Canadian owner withdrew from a Virginia deal under boycott pressure — one of at least five property owners to back out of a detention-warehouse sale after public protest. In Social Circle, Georgia, a town of five thousand staring down a ten-thousand-bed facility locked the building’s water meter. Where the warehouse was already bought, states have gone to court: Maryland sued and a federal judge temporarily halted construction of a fifteen-hundred-bed conversion in April; Salt Lake City and its county sued this month to stop another. The tools differ — a packed hearing, a boycott, a zoning vote, an environmental-review lawsuit — but the through-line is ordinary people insisting a government explain itself before it acts.
Where you live decides
What these refusals share is timing. The ones that worked best came early — before a sale closed, before the data changed hands, before the machinery arrived; a line is easier to hold before the pressure than after. That is the whole reason we keep the scorecard. A limit on federal power is not self-executing; it holds only where someone has written it into durable law, in advance, and is willing to defend it. We track nine of those limits — what data your state protects, which doors require a warrant, whether local police can be deputized — state by state, and we keep the record public. Most of the country has drawn very few of them: the average state scores just over three out of eighteen. That number is not an abstraction this year. It is the difference between a state walled off from an untrod federal demand and one that is open by default.
The reach is real, and it is fast — across data, police, and detention at once. The refusal is real too — in courtrooms and statehouses, in packed hearing rooms, in the streets, and across party lines. Which one prevails where you live is not settled, and it is not someone else’s decision to make.
What you can do
Look up your own state. See which of these limits the law where you live has actually drawn — whose data is protected, which doors require a warrant, whether local police can be deputized — and which it has left open. Then tell the people who represent you which lines you want held.
Check your state: www.FederalLimits.org/federal
Reach your representatives in a minute:
https://FederalLimits.org/#take-action
Records can be gathered in a season, and walls can go up in one. The limits that keep that power in check took far longer to build — and they will hold exactly as far as we insist they do. This far, and no farther.
— Federal Limits
Federal Limits is a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) nonprofit tracking the legal limits on federal authority — the due-process protections that apply to every American — across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. Our methodology, our sources, and every state’s full scorecard are public. This work is funded by people who believe those limits are worth defending. If that’s you, help keep it going at www.FederalLimits.org/support.