A federal judge on Monday ruled that a Trump administration project to aggregate Americans’ personal data to check voter eligibility is unlawful, and the resulting data tool cannot be used in its current form.
Several states have already run their entire voter lists through the system, known as SAVE, which was overhauled by the Trump administration last year. While the tool is supposed to flag potential noncitizens and deceased voters, a number of American citizens who are foreign-born have been mistakenly flagged as potential noncitizens.
“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,” U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The SAVE Overhaul
SAVE is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and was previously used by state and federal agencies to check whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. Those checks were done one by one.
Last year, the Department of Homeland Security, with the help of DOGE, made it possible to perform bulk checks on SAVE. Further changes linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and added the records of American-born citizens.
Judge Sooknanan wrote that in performing this overhaul, federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
Under the judge’s order, the overhauled SAVE tool can no longer be used. The federal government can appeal the ruling.
Impact on Voters
In April, then-USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said more than 60 million voters had had their records run through the revamped SAVE system, and of those, 21,000 — less than 1% — had been flagged as potential noncitizens.
Trump and his administration have focused on curtailing voting by noncitizens, even though it is already against federal law and research has found it extremely rare. Critics say the SAVE tool wrongly flags naturalized citizens, putting their voting rights at risk.
The case of Anthony Nel, a naturalized citizen who was removed from the voter rolls in Texas after being flagged by SAVE, illustrates the problem. He later proved his citizenship and was reinstated. Nel told NPR that Monday’s ruling was a “step in the right direction” for voting and privacy rights.
The Legal Basis
Sooknanan’s order found that federal agencies did not have statutory authority to overhaul SAVE. She found the creation of the expanded SAVE violated the Privacy, Social Security, and Administrative Procedure acts.
The Department of Justice, which is representing DHS in the lawsuit, said in a statement: “The Department will continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
But plaintiffs’ lawyers said the ruling confirms what critics have argued all along. “They just didn’t listen to the American people who spoke out against this plan,” said Nikhel Sus, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “And now we have a court saying this is an unlawful, unreliable system and it needs to be shut down unless and until Congress authorizes it.”
The Bottom Line
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s overhauled SAVE voter verification system is unlawful and cannot be used in its current form. The judge found that federal agencies violated privacy and administrative laws when they expanded the system to run bulk checks on millions of voters. More than 60 million voters had been run through the system, and some naturalized citizens were wrongly flagged as noncitizens. The government can appeal.
