A federal judge ruled Monday that a Trump administration data system built to check the citizenship of American voters is unlawful and cannot continue to be used in its current form.
The system, known as SAVE, was originally designed to check whether foreign-born individuals were eligible for certain government benefits. The Department of Homeland Security, with help from DOGE, overhauled it last year to allow bulk checks on all Americans, linking it to Social Security Administration data for the first time and adding records of American-born citizens. Several states had already run their entire voter rolls through the system before the ruling came down.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote in her 75-page ruling that federal agencies had "haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable." She also 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," adding, "This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens."
A significant number of American citizens who were born abroad had been mistakenly flagged by SAVE as potential noncitizens. In April, then-USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said more than 60 million voter records had been run through the system. Of those, 21,000, less than 1%, were flagged as potential noncitizens.
NPR, which was first to report on the federal government's expansion of SAVE and its failure to follow required public notice protocols under the Privacy Act, noted that the system had become central to the Trump administration's voting and elections agenda. On March 31, Trump signed an executive order directing DHS to use SAVE and other federal data to generate a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters in each state. That order faces separate legal challenges.
An earlier executive order from March 2025 had also required DHS to provide free access to a verification tool for checking the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters. Courts had stopped parts of that order, but USCIS proceeded with updates to SAVE anyway.
Under Sooknanan's ruling, the overhauled version of the SAVE tool can no longer be used.