A federal judge delivered a significant rebuke to the Trump administration's election integrity efforts on Monday, ruling that a recently expanded federal data tool violates Americans' privacy rights and poses a direct threat to their voting rights. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ordered an immediate halt to the use of the revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program for citizenship checks on voter rolls.
Privacy Violations and Voting Rights at Risk
In her order, Judge Sooknanan delivered a forceful condemnation of the federal government's actions. "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," she wrote. "This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens." The judge found that 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 ruling represents a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had characterized as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key component of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year.
Millions of Voter Records Scanned
The SAVE program was originally created under an immigration law mandating that the Department of Homeland Security help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. However, since the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities in April 2025, at least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, raising concerns among voting rights advocates that it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, responded dismissively to the ruling on social media: "It's amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist." The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.
Naturalized Citizens Face Heightened Risk
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.
Judge Sooknanan found that "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. 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, representing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the court during an October 2025 hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls. "They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database," Sus said. On Monday, he characterized 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.
Why This Matters:
This ruling protects the voting rights of millions of Americans, particularly naturalized citizens who are most vulnerable to being wrongly removed from voter rolls due to unreliable citizenship data. With at least 67 million voter registrations already scanned through the expanded SAVE program, the court's intervention prevents potential mass disenfranchisement that could have occurred before future elections. The decision reinforces critical privacy protections that Congress established to prevent the federal government from centralizing Americans' personal information without proper safeguards or transparency. By holding federal agencies accountable for knowingly violating statutory protections, the ruling upholds the principle that election integrity measures must not come at the cost of citizens' fundamental rights to privacy and democratic participation.