Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it
could wrongly purge voters
[June 23, 2026]
By ALI SWENSON and FATIMA HUSSEIN
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently
revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s
efforts to nationalize elections can no longer be used.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy
groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic
Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’
sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being
wrongly purged from voter rolls.
“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 said in an order explaining the
decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from
centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the
federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database
violates those statutory protections.”
The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his
efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on
having noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE
system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal
database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second
election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this
year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.
“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving
problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at
the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social
media post.
DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of
Justice said in an emailed statement that it would “continue to
aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and
DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
Voting by noncitizens was already rare
The executive order seeking to create a national voter list is among
numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul
the way elections are run. He also has tried to force voters to provide
documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, ban mail ballots
from counting if they are received after Election Day and prohibit 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, in part
because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set
election rules, but provides no such power to the president.
Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential
felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for
just a tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls,
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 used it to check their voter
rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly
expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million
registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry
it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.
Anthony Nel was one of those whose registrations were wrongly flagged.
The South Africa native became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but
had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, canceled
temporarily last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The
check wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen.
“I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for
granted,” he said in a text message.
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Voting booths are set up at a polling location inside St. Luke's
Methodist Church, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, in Oklahoma City. (AP
Photo/Nate Billings)
Right to keep Americans' data private is at heart of the case
The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic
Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had
alleged 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.
“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,” the judge wrote. “So they
haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of
millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to
be unreliable.”
Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October
hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully
being purged from voter rolls.
“They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus,
an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington.
Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan’s ruling as an “across the board
victory” and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge’s ruling
reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn’t have
implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.
Mark Johnson, who teaches at the University of Kansas law school and
regularly pursues lawsuits over election laws, said “it couldn’t be
more clear” that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws.
He said an executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law.
“It’s an illegal idea. Plus it’s a bad idea,” he said.
Elon Musk's DOGE effort was crucial for updating the SAVE system
During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims
of widespread noncitizen voting, Republican secretaries of state
began requesting improvements to the SAVE system to make it more
efficient for catching noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation
was that the system had been able to check just a single individual
at a time.
DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk’s
Department of Government Efficiency delivered on those requests in
2025, according to public announcements. They made SAVE free for
election officials, allowed agencies to search voters by the
thousands and began permitting queries using names, birthdays and
Social Security numbers, as opposed to requiring DHS-issued
identification numbers.
Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved
its value as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter
citizenship. But in her ruling, Judge Sooknanan said the plaintiffs
had shown that the updated system had indeed been identifying some
lawful voters as noncitizens and that states using it “are actively
removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate
information.”
___
Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writer John Hanna
in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.
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