The emails, made public on Tuesday, showed communications between the Texas Department of Public Safety and Secretary of State's office regarding plans for the voter purge.
— made public Tuesday by the League of United Latin American Citizens , a civil rights organization founded in 1929, and the Campaign Legal Center — showed communications between the state's DPS and Secretary of State's office regarding plans for the voter purge. They reveal that the state had begun working on the program several months before Whitley was appointed to office.
"This was Gov. Abbott's program. He started it with [Attorney General] Ken Paxton, and he did this thinking they were going to pull off a stunt and they got caught with their pants down," Luis Vera, general counsel of LULAC, toldIn an email sent August last year, John Crawford, a top official from the DPS, told staffers that the driver license department of the organization had previously been asked to provide records to cross-reference with state voter rolls.
"The Governor is interested in getting this information as soon as possible." Amanda Arriaga, the director of the DPS' driver license division, said in another email. In a statement, Abbott asserted that he only started talks with the DPS this March despite the emails suggesting that the DPS and the Secretary of State's office had begun working on the voter purge in March 2018."Neither the Governor, nor the Governor's office gave a directive to initiate this process," Abbott's spokesperson John Wittman toldreached out to the Texas Department of Safety for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas addresses the crowd before President Donald Trump took the stage for a rally in support of Sen. Ted Cruz on October 22, 2018 at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas. Newly released Department of Public Safety emails show that Abbott spearheaded the state's program to purge roughly 100,000 suspected non-U.S. citizens from the voter roll using flawed data.
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