Key takeaways:
- The justices voted 6-3 to pause a lower court order blocking the expanded SAVE system.
- The overhaul links SAVE to Social Security records and allows bulk checks of voter rolls.
- In Texas, about 20% of 2,724 voters initially flagged by SAVE were later found to be citizens and reinstated, according to a state release cited by NPR.
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to resume using an expanded federal database to check the citizenship of registered voters, pausing a lower court order that had blocked the system over privacy and voting-rights concerns.
The 6-3 decision grants the administration emergency relief while the legal fight continues. The court’s conservative justices formed the majority; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The database, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, was created to check immigration status for public-benefits eligibility. The Department of Homeland Security expanded it by linking it to Social Security Administration records, enabling searches by Social Security number and bulk checks of voter rolls. The changes followed a March 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump directing agencies to take steps to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote.
In its unsigned ruling, the Supreme Court said federal law obliges the government to respond to state and local election officials seeking citizenship information. The lower court’s order, it said, “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” The justices also said the voting-rights groups’ legal claims “likely lack merit.”
The court noted a limit on the ruling’s immediate effect: Federal law generally bars broad, systematic removals from voter rolls in the 90 days before a federal election. States can still make individual inquiries about voters.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the expanded system in June, finding that its use of sensitive information violated federal laws governing Social Security data, privacy and administrative procedure. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote. An appeals court declined to suspend her order before the administration went to the Supreme Court.
The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which challenged the overhaul, say the system can incorrectly identify eligible voters as potential noncitizens and force them to prove their citizenship to remain registered. They also argue that Congress has not authorized the government to build what they called a “master database of U.S. Citizens.”
Jackson wrote in dissent that the administration had not shown sufficient reason to block the lower court’s ruling. “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the injunction made it harder to detect ineligible voters. In court filings cited by NPR, he said the expanded system had checked more than 65 million voters across 26 states since May 2025 and flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens.
Texas ran more than 18 million registrations through SAVE, which flagged 2,724 voters as potential noncitizens. NPR reported that, according to the Texas secretary of state, about 20% of those flagged were later found to be citizens and reinstated. The office referred 117 cases for investigation of possible noncitizen voting. NBC News reported that three people had been charged with voting illegally as noncitizens in Texas. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
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