A federal judge in Washington D.C. blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database expansion on June 22, 2026, ruling that the Trump administration knowingly violated privacy laws in its overhaul of a system used for homeland security citizenship data verification.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, issued a 75-page decision finding that DHS exceeded its authority by combining Social Security Administration data with citizenship records in the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. The judge wrote that “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The SAVE system was originally designed to help government agencies verify immigration status for benefit and license applicants. Following an executive order signed by President Trump on March 31, 2026, DHS upgraded the system to allow bulk searches using partial Social Security numbers and made it freely available to state and local election officials for voter verification purposes.
Sooknanan found that DHS violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers, provisions of the 1974 Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The judge noted that the agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed” millions of Americans’ sensitive personal information, including citizenship data that the government knew to be unreliable.
The expanded SAVE program had already checked the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters, mostly from Republican-led states. The system flagged thousands of voters as potential noncitizens, but investigations showed many were actually citizens eligible to vote. Internal DHS memos warned that naturalized citizens faced particular risk of having their registrations erroneously cancelled.
The ruling, brought by the League of Women Voters and advocacy groups challenging the database expansion, vacates the modified SAVE system and orders DHS to return it to its pre-2025 status. The decision prevents states from further using the expanded database for voter purges. The Department of Justice has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. for access to voter registration records for testing in the database, but has lost all nine lawsuits filed to date.
Sooknanan declined to address constitutional claims that the SAVE expansion violated the U.S. Constitution’s assignment of election administration to states and Congress, instead basing her ruling solely on statutory violations. The Trump administration can appeal the decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Sources
- Democracy Docket — reporting on the judge’s 75-page decision and findings of privacy law violations
- Politico — details on Judge Sooknanan’s ruling, the inaccurate data flagging citizens as noncitizens, and the defamation implications
- NPR — coverage of the federal judge’s ruling that the Trump administration’s voter verification system is unlawful
- The New York Times — reporting on the federal judge’s decision blocking the citizenship database tool for voter screening
