A federal judge has halted the Trump administration's expanded use of a citizenship verification system designed to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls, dealing a significant blow to election integrity efforts that had been adopted by at least 25 states since April 2025. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled Monday that recent upgrades to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, violated federal privacy protections by centralizing Americans' personal data without proper authorization.
The ruling blocks a key component of President Donald Trump's second election executive order, which directed federal agencies to assist states in removing ineligible voters from registration lists. Since the program's expansion about 1 year and 2 months ago, at least 67 million voter registrations have been processed through the system as states worked to ensure only eligible citizens remain on their rolls.
The Legal Challenge
In her order, Judge Sooknanan stated that "the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote." She determined that Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans' personal identifying information and that federal agencies "knew that the database violates those statutory protections."
The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five unnamed U.S. citizens who alleged the revamped SAVE program violated privacy and voting rights. The plaintiffs also claimed the Trump administration ignored federal transparency requirements when implementing changes to the system.
Government Response and Program Background
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, responded 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 comment on the ruling.
The SAVE program was originally created under immigration law to help federal, state, and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. The Trump administration significantly expanded its capabilities in April 2025, enabling states to cross-reference voter registration data with citizenship records on an unprecedented scale.
Concerns About Accuracy
Judge Sooknanan wrote that 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." She added that officials "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, argued during an October 2025 hearing that naturalized citizens face particular risk of wrongful removal from voter rolls. "They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database," Sus told the court. Following Monday's ruling, Sus called it an "across the board victory" and noted the decision reinforced that "the federal government doesn't have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies."
Critics of the expanded system have expressed concern that it could result in eligible voters being purged from rolls due to data inaccuracies, though the administration has maintained the tool is essential for maintaining election integrity and preventing illegal voting by noncitizens.
Why This Matters:
This ruling strikes at the heart of efforts to verify voter eligibility at a time when election integrity remains a central concern for millions of Americans. The decision leaves 25 states that had relied on the enhanced SAVE system without a key tool for checking citizenship status on voter rolls, potentially complicating their ability to maintain accurate registration lists. The case highlights ongoing tensions between election security measures and privacy protections, with the court prioritizing statutory limits on data centralization over administrative flexibility in implementing voter verification programs. The ruling also underscores questions about whether existing federal systems can adequately support state efforts to ensure only eligible citizens participate in elections, or whether new legislative frameworks are needed to balance these competing interests. With 67 million registrations already processed through the system, the decision's impact on state election administration could be substantial.