Judge blocks Trump voter citizenship database overhaul

A federal judge in Washington on Monday struck down the Trump administration’s overhaul of a federal citizenship-checking system, ruling that officials unlawfully combined Americans’ personal information into a database that has been used by some states to wrongly flag U.S. citizens on voter rolls.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan set aside the expanded version of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE. In a 75-page ruling, she found that the administration violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

SAVE, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, had long been used by state and federal agencies to check one person at a time to determine whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. The Trump administration expanded the system last year to allow bulk searches, connect it for the first time to Social Security Administration records and include records of American-born citizens.

The plaintiffs — including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and individual voters — argued that the changes turned SAVE into a “searchable national citizenship data system” drawing from DHS and Social Security records. They sued DHS, the SSA and the Justice Department, saying the consolidation of sensitive personal data was unlawful.

Sooknanan agreed, writing that federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” She said the overhauled system and related agency notices were “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.”

The overhaul followed Trump administration executive orders that sought to make citizenship verification central to voting policy, including directives for DHS and the SSA to provide state and local officials with a tool to check the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters or people trying to register. Courts have blocked key parts of those orders, but USCIS proceeded with updates to SAVE.

Several states have already run their voter registration lists through the revamped system. NPR reported that more than 60 million voter records had been checked through SAVE as of April, when then-USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said 21,000 records — less than 1% — had been flagged as potential noncitizens.

Some U.S. citizens were incorrectly flagged. NPR reported that Texas removed Anthony Nel, who was born in South Africa and became a U.S. citizen as a teenager when his parents naturalized, after he did not respond in time to a letter instructing him to prove his citizenship at a county election office. He was among more than 2,700 people flagged as potential noncitizens after Texas ran its voter list through SAVE. USCIS acknowledges in a fact sheet that some categories of foreign-born citizens cannot be verified by SAVE.

Justice Department lawyers argued that only a small number of naturalized voters may have inaccurate citizenship data in Social Security records. Sooknanan called that a “red herring” and said the spread of inaccurate citizenship information was defamatory in part because it implied people removed from voter rolls may have violated the federal ban on noncitizen voting. She said the administration’s “arguments to the contrary border on the absurd.”

DHS general counsel James Percival criticized the ruling in a post on X, writing, “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s [sic] latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!”

Voting rights groups welcomed the decision. “Today’s decision is a resounding victory for voters,” said Marcia Johnson of the League of Women Voters. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, called it an “important victory for the American people and our democracy.”

The federal government can appeal the ruling to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.