Quentin Young, Colorado Newsline

A group of Democratic secretaries of state in a letter to top Trump administration officials say they’re concerned the administration misled them about how it would use voter data collected from their states.

The letter, dated Tuesday, is addressed to Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, and Kristi Noem, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Justice, overseen by Bondi, in recent months has demanded voter information from numerous states. The information would allow the DOJ to evaluate state compliance with federal voting laws, department officials had said.

But federal officials later acknowledged that the DOJ shared voter roll information with Homeland Security to search it for noncitizens as a way to “scrub aliens from voter rolls.”...

Democrats in the Colorado Legislature might finally succeed in passing groundbreaking restrictions on semiautomatic firearms.

They have introduced a bill that would ban the sale of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns that can accept detachable magazines. Numerous lawmakers have signed on, and the bill already cleared its first hurdle when it passed a Senate committee vote last week.

But Senate Bill 25-3 is an odd departure from previous efforts to regulate semiautomatic rifles. It purports to better enforce the intent of a law regarding high-capacity magazines. But the bill’s unusual provisions have caused some confusion about its practicality and potential impact, and its central restriction, as gun rights advocates have noted, raises a safety concern. ...

Some families with students in Aurora Public Schools are worried they could be vulnerable to federal immigration enforcement, according to several community leaders who say that some schools have seen low attendance in recent days.

The fears come as the administration of Republican President Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promise to dramatically escalate enforcement against undocumented people, particularly in Aurora, the state’s third-biggest city, which Trump has targeted by name based on exaggerated or false information about migrant criminal activity.

The school district acknowledged student fears in a message it sent to school families Monday. ...

Federal law enforcement agents announced that they took almost 50 people, including many who were undocumented, into custody Sunday in Adams County.

An operation that involved members of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the Drug Enforcement Agency; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and local law enforcement targeted what officials said was drug trafficking that involved members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TdA.

“DEA’s Rocky Mountain Field Division has been investigating TdA drug trafficking since last summer, and today’s successful operation shows that the men and women of DEA will not rest until our communities are safe from this gang and the drugs they peddle,” Jonathan Pullen, a local DEA special agent in charge, said in a press release Sunday....

Donald Trump is ineligible to be president.

An impartial assessment of facts and law leads to that conclusion, according to some constitutional scholars.

There is little doubt that the Republican president-elect will be inaugurated in January, and there is no doubt that he won the November election. But his status as disqualified from the presidency was established by Colorado courts last year, and his inauguration will do nothing to change that. ...