A federal judge in Washington, DC, on Monday barred the Trump administration from using a revised personal-information database, saying the White House had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The Department of Homeland Security had updated its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, after President Trump issued a March 2025 executive order aimed at ensuring that only US citizens participate in federal elections.
In the wake of that directive, DHS expanded SAVE to include natural-born US citizens and enabled large-scale searches using names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers, instead of limiting queries to DHS-issued identification numbers.
“[D]ecades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank,” US District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan wrote in a 75-page opinion. “And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”
“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” Sooknanan continued. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
The ruling drew sharp criticism from administration officials. DHS General Counsel James Percival wrote on X: “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!”
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White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller also responded derisively, writing, “Judge Sparkle decrees that America belongs to any random alien on planet earth, just like our founders intended.”
In an emailed statement, the Department of Justice said it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
Some of Trump’s other election-related actions during his second term include mandating documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, banning the counting of mail ballots received after Election Day and prohibiting the Postal Service from mailing ballots to people not on an approved list of voters.
Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, largely because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president.
The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states have used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025. At least 67 million registrations, mainly in red states, have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.
The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed US citizens had sued DHS, the DOJ and the Social Security Administration, charging the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.
With Post wires
