A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s revamped voter database over privacy violations, ruling that the system unlawfully consolidated Americans’ sensitive personal information including Social Security numbers and citizenship data. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan found that the administration violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act when it transformed a decades-old immigration verification tool into a searchable national citizenship database.
The overhauled SAVE system—Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements—was modified to include records of native-born citizens, access Social Security Administration data, and permit bulk searches by state and local election officials. Tens of millions of voters have already had their records run through the database, according to NPR reporting, with more than 60 million records processed as of April 2026.
“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,” Judge Sooknanan wrote in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” She said the Trump administration “flunked compliance” with federal privacy laws by “haphazardly” combining and repurposing “the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The database expansion stemmed from an executive order Trump signed on March 31, 2026, directing federal agencies to create a system to verify citizenship for voter registration. The changes were made by the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Government Efficiency, with the help of DOGE, according to NPR.
Inaccurate Flagging and Real Harm
States used the revamped SAVE system to purge their voter rolls, but the process incorrectly identified U.S. citizens—particularly foreign-born naturalized citizens—as potential noncitizens. NPR reported that of the more than 60 million records processed through SAVE, about 21,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens, less than 1 percent. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledges that some categories of foreign-born citizens cannot be verified by SAVE.
One documented case involved Anthony Nel, a South African-born U.S. citizen who had been registered to vote in Texas for nine years. After the state ran its voter list through SAVE, Nel was among more than 2,700 individuals flagged as potential noncitizens and removed from the rolls when he did not respond in time to a letter demanding proof of citizenship, according to NPR. He was later reinstated after presenting his renewed passport.
The Trump administration had defended the SAVE overhaul as a “clear congressional directive to break down information silos between government agencies.” But Judge Sooknanan dismissed that argument, calling it a “red herring.” She noted that the dissemination of inaccurate citizenship information is defamatory because it implies those wrongly purged violated federal law against noncitizen voting.
The ruling can be appealed. The Department of Justice, representing the Department of Homeland Security in the lawsuit, stated it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.” A DHS official responded to the decision by claiming the judge was preventing the agency from addressing what he characterized as a nonexistent problem, misspelling the judge’s name in his post on X.
Voting rights advocates hailed the decision as a major victory. The judge’s block of the voter database drew praise from organizations that had challenged the system in court, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Democracy Forward, which called the ruling “a resounding victory for voters.”
Sources
- CBS News — Judge Sooknanan’s ruling, privacy violations, and centralized database details
- NPR — SAVE system overhaul, millions of voter records processed, Anthony Nel case, citizenship verification issues
- Votebeat — Judge’s ruling against Trump administration’s election agenda
- Reuters — Federal judge blocking revamped immigration database for voter checks
