A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped citizenship database to check voter rolls, ruling that the government violated federal privacy laws when it created the centralized system containing Americans’ Social Security numbers and citizenship data.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., sided with voting rights advocates including the League of Women Voters, finding that the Department of Homeland Security violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act in overhauling the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.
“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 wrote in her 75-page decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The SAVE system, originally designed to verify immigration status for federal benefits, had been in use since 1986. But after President Trump signed an executive order in March 2026 directing citizenship verification for voter registration, the Trump administration dramatically expanded the database to include records from roughly 26.5 million people and made it searchable using partial Social Security numbers.
Sooknanan said the administration “haphazardly” combined Americans’ sensitive records from multiple federal agencies, including data the government itself knew to be unreliable. Internal DHS memos warned that naturalized citizens would be at particular risk of having their registrations erroneously cancelled, according to the ruling.
The expanded SAVE program has been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters, mostly from Republican-led states. The program flagged thousands of voters as potential noncitizens, but subsequent investigations showed many were actually citizens eligible to vote. Sooknanan highlighted this risk in her opinion, calling the government’s argument that only a small number of naturalized voters might be wrongly flagged “a red herring.”
The judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to set aside the modifications to the SAVE system and return it to its status before the 2025 overhaul. The ruling also vacates related notices issued by DHS and the Social Security Administration. The Trump administration can appeal the decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Voting rights organizations celebrated the ruling as a major victory. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, one of the organizations that challenged the database, said in a statement: “The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information. 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.”
The decision comes as the Justice Department has pursued an aggressive strategy to obtain voter data from states. The DOJ has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for access to voter registration records, but has lost all nine cases it has brought to trial so far. Sooknanan’s ruling would appear to prevent Republican state election officials from further running their registration rolls through the expanded SAVE system, though the administration may seek to appeal or modify the database in response.
