Washington — A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration unlawfully established a centralized database containing private information about Americans, a system she said has been used by some states to wrongly remove U.S. citizens from voter rolls.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of a voting rights organization and a privacy-focused nonprofit, finding that the administration violated three separate federal laws in creating the system, which includes citizenship-related data on Americans.
“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,” she wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
Sooknanan vacated the administration’s changes to a Department of Homeland Security database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, which is used to confirm citizenship and immigration status.
The plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration transformed the program into what they described as a “searchable national citizenship data system,” pulling information from both the Social Security Administration and DHS records.
In her decision, Sooknanan said the case centered on two core protections against government overreach: Americans’ right to privacy and their right to vote. She also found that the agencies involved knew the data-sharing system ran afoul of privacy safeguards Congress enacted decades earlier.
The judge said the Trump administration “flunked compliance” with the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by “haphazardly” merging and repurposing “the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The database was developed by multiple federal agencies after an executive order signed by President Trump last year that sought to impose a new proof-of-citizenship requirement on voter registration. The order instructed DHS and the SSA to build a system that would allow state and local officials to check the citizenship or immigration status of people seeking to register to vote.
The executive order drew several legal challenges, and key provisions have been blocked.
Still, the directive triggered the overhaul of the SAVE system, which was modified to include the records of natural-born citizens, to access records from the SSA, including Social Security numbers, and to permit bulk searches of records by entities that use the database.
In response to the administration’s efforts to pool Americans’ data, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five individuals sued DHS, the SSA and the Department of Justice, arguing that the consolidation of Americans’ sensitive records from multiple agencies was unlawful.
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The plaintiffs said that since the SAVE system was modified, states had partnered with the federal government to run their voter registration lists through the database and purged people who were incorrectly identified as noncitizens from their voter rolls.
The Trump administration had defended its use of the SAVE system, which has been used since 1986, as a “clear congressional directive to break down information silos between government agencies.” The administration argued that the suit should be dismissed because DHS had the authority to modernize the database.
Justice Department lawyers told the court that only a small number of naturalized voters may have inaccurate citizenship data in SSA records. But Sooknanan called the argument a “red herring” and said the dissemination of inaccurate information about citizenship status is defamatory, in part because it implies that those who were improperly removed from voter rolls violated a federal prohibition against noncitizen voting.
She said the Trump administration’s “arguments to the contrary border on the absurd.”
The judge said the overhauled system and related notices from DHS and the SSA were “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.”
The decision can be appealed to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. It was cheered by one of the organizations representing the plaintiffs in the case as an “important victory for the American people and our democracy.”
“The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement. “We are honored to work alongside the plaintiffs and co-counsel in this case, and are grateful that the court has acted to protect people and our elections every day and especially during our nation’s 250th anniversary year.”
