A federal judge has blocked the revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a key federal tool intended to verify citizen voters, citing privacy concerns. The decision, handed down on Monday, represents a significant setback for efforts to secure the national electorate against non-citizen voting.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups, ruling that recent upgrades to the SAVE program aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a manner that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.
Judge Sooknanan stated, “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 added that Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information, and that the federal agencies creating the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”
The judge further noted that the agencies involved 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 concluded that they “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
This ruling constitutes a major legal setback for President Donald Trump’s efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order signed by the Republican president earlier this year.
The Battle for National Elections
Separately, the Trump administration is threatening to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal homeland security funds from states unless they adopt a sweeping set of election changes. This move is part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to root out alleged voter fraud and exert more federal influence over how elections are run.
Under new rules governing several homeland security grant programs, states must take steps including phasing out certain electronic voting systems, moving to hand-marked paper ballots, and running their voter rolls through a Department of Homeland Security citizenship verification database. States that refuse would lose 20% of the grant money, potentially millions of dollars in security funds.
A DHS spokesperson stated that “Any recipient of federal funding should expect accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent,” adding that the administration considers election security to be a core national security priority.
However, the Constitution gives states control over administering the ballot, and courts have found that the president has very limited powers to force election rule changes on his own. David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer, anticipates the new requirements will be “blocked in the courts.”
The new mandates require states to conduct manual election audits using methods established by the Trump administration and to use an approved government system to verify the citizenship of any person working at a polling location. States must also submit a plan to phase out voting systems that do not use hand-marked paper ballots. Currently, about 30% of voters in the country live in places that rely entirely on ballot-marking devices or direct-recording systems.
The grant conditions also require states to run their full voter rolls through SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements tool, used to identify potential noncitizen voters. Critics claim the DHS system is flawed, producing false matches and potentially wrongly flagging eligible voters for removal.
Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony that could lead to deportation, though it is rare. The SAVE program was originally created under an immigration law mandating DHS help agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. Since April 2025, one year and two months ago, at least 25 states have used the expanded SAVE system to check their voter rolls, scanning at least 67 million registrations.
Anthony Nel, a South Africa native who became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago, had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, temporarily canceled last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE, which wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen. Plaintiffs’ attorney Nikhel Sus noted that naturalized citizens are “uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database.”
Protecting National Assets
In a separate development, the Senate advanced a massive, Trump-backed housing package that proponents say will prevent the U.S. from becoming a “nation of renters.” The 21st Century Road to Housing Act, now on a glide path to President Donald Trump’s desk, is the first major push by Congress to address housing regulations in decades.
This package, which Trump has been calling on lawmakers to complete, includes a key provision to block investors from buying up housing stock. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the architects, stated the legislation would help by “beating back private equity, so they won’t invade your neighborhood, buy up all the houses, and turn America into a nation of renters.”
The package also aims to increase access to manufactured housing and waives some environmental review regulations for new home construction. Sen. Bernie Moreno, whose provision for pre-approved housing designs made it into the package, said the legislation “sends a signal to state and local communities, to say, ‘Hey, guys, you really have to drive down the cost of housing, and you do that by not torturing homebuilders.’” This effort seeks to protect the native working class from dispossession by transnational capital, ensuring access to homeownership.
Manufacturing employment, a traditional bedrock for the native working class, peaked in 1979 at nearly 19.6 million jobs, but now stands at 12.6 million as of May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.