You Should Be Concerned About the Trump Administration’s Abuse of Personal Data

The Trump administration is accessing, centralizing, and weaponizing individuals’ government-held personal data to advance its draconian and inhumane anti-immigrant agenda. It claims to have created a searchable national data system for election officials to use to verify voters’ citizenship — an unprecedented consolidation of agency-held data for blatantly partisan and xenophobic purposes, including the targeting of immigrants for mass detention and deportation.

The administration is refusing to say exactly what information it’s using in this citizenship data system, how reliable that material is, or how it plans to keep the data secure. At the same time, it’s taking a hatchet to federal agencies — including some it claims to have scraped data from — and also refusing to answer questions about those destructive actions.

We’re investigating. With the Campaign Legal Center, we filed 17 public records requests for records that could show what information the Trump administration is using in its national data system, and how the system may weaponize sensitive information to target immigrants and undermine voting rights.

Last month, we sent requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the “U.S. DOGE Service” (USDS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the Social Security Administration (SSA), seeking the release of top officials’ communications, contracts, and directives related to the system.
These records could shed light on how the system is fueling anti-voting rights activists’ efforts and encouraging policies that disenfranchise eligible voters and could ultimately chill voter turnout, especially among people of color and naturalized citizens.
Read more here about how we’re investigating the Trump administration’s compromise of Americans’ personal information and potential misuse of data included in the searchable citizenship system.

Fighting Back Against the Trump Administration’s Attacks on the Freedom of Information

In another attempt to evade transparency, the Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that it would unlawfully require Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesters to re-confirm their interest in pending requests to the agency before producing the records — a move that could result in countless unlawfully closed FOIA requests submitted by media outlets, nonpartisan organizations, and members of the public.

On Wednesday, we sued DOE, arguing that this unlawful requirement exceeds the agency’s authority under FOIA, violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and undermines Congress’ clear intent that agencies process public records requests in a timely manner.
The new policy would directly impact outstanding requests that we submitted to the agency before October 1, 2024 — which have already languished without responses for nearly a year or longer.
“The Trump administration doesn’t get to invent new hoops for the public to jump through to obtain lawfully requested government records,” our Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said. “It appears that the Department of Energy is being used by the administration as a trial balloon for dismantling FOIA, and if the court doesn’t step in now, this unlawful policy will spread and gut the public’s right to know across the federal government.”

A Win for Harvard and for Education

A court ruled this week that the Trump administration unlawfully froze Harvard University’s federal research funding, rebuking the administration’s weaponization of the federal government against institutions it perceives as ideological adversaries.

In a sweeping opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs called the Trump administration’s attack on Harvard a “targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
“This ruling sends a clear message that academic institutions and other targets of this administration’s political retaliation are not powerless — they can, and must, stand up and fight back,” Chukwu said.”
We’re suing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over its refusal to turn over records about Trump’s efforts to revoke the school’s nonprofit status.
Last month, the administration attempted to dismiss our lawsuit, erroneously arguing that all the records we’d sought — including phone logs, calendar invites, and more — would reveal confidential tax return information and were therefore protected from disclosure. We disagree.
Read more here about our ongoing case.

On the Records

Censorship in Schools

Since 2021, 24 states have adopted educational gag orders that ban books that are unilaterally deemed “inappropriate” and restrict classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexuality. To illustrate how the implementation of so-called “divisive concept” laws denies students the opportunity to learn about diverse cultures, basic history, and common identities, we created a quiz — based on the documents we obtained — that asks you to identify real examples of this censorship. Take the quiz here!

You can read more about the chilling effect of these laws — as well as how they threaten the foundational principles of public education and democracy — in our recent report, “The Far-Right Attack on Education: How Curriculum and Classroom Censorship Stifles Educators, Harms Students, and Threatens Our Democracy.”

On the Records

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