Judge rules Trump-era SAVE voter data system unlawful

A federal judge on Monday ruled that the Trump administration’s overhaul of the SAVE system — a data tool that aggregates Americans’ personal information to check voter eligibility — is unlawful and cannot be used in its current form. The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, is the most significant judicial setback yet for the administration’s effort to make bulk citizenship checks a centerpiece of its voting agenda.

In a 75-page ruling, Sooknanan wrote that the Department of Homeland Security and associated agencies had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” She found that the expansion of SAVE violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

“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,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The SAVE system is operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a DHS component. Before the Trump administration overhauled it last year, SAVE was used primarily for one-by-one checks by state and federal agencies verifying whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. The Trump administration, with assistance from DOGE, made it possible to perform bulk checks. Further changes linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and added records of American-born citizens.

Under Sooknanan’s order, the overhauled SAVE tool can no longer be used. The federal government can appeal the ruling. A DHS spokesperson’s response flagged a post by the department’s general counsel, James Percival, who wrote on X: “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s [sic] latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” The post misspelled the judge’s name.

The overhauled SAVE system had already been pressed into service across multiple states. In April of this year, then-USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said more than 60 million voters had had their records run through the revamped system, and of those, 21,000 — less than 1% — had been flagged as potential noncitizens. Noncitizen voting is already prohibited under federal law, and research and state reviews have found it to be extremely rare.

Several states have run their entire voter lists through SAVE, and the system has erroneously flagged American citizens who are foreign-born. MSI previously reported that the Trump administration had been conducting months of voter-eligibility checks that raised fears of widespread purges ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sooknanan wrote in her ruling that in performing the overhaul, federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The ruling also noted that after plaintiffs filed the lawsuit challenging the SAVE overhaul, DHS and SSA retroactively issued notices about the changes that had already been made. The notices drew tens of thousands of negative comments, but the agencies did not modify their plans.

“They just didn’t listen to the American people who spoke out against this plan,” said Nikhel Sus, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents plaintiffs in the case. “And now we have a court saying, you know, exactly what these commenters were saying, which is that this is an unlawful, unreliable system and it needs to be shut down unless and until Congress authorizes it.”

Marcia Johnson of the League of Women Voters, another plaintiff, said in a statement: “Today’s decision is a resounding victory for voters. Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”

The Trump administration had also made SAVE checks central to its broader voting agenda. On March 31, President 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. Legal challenges are aiming to halt that order. An earlier executive order from March 2025, which included a mandate that DHS provide free access to a verification tool for checking the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters, was partially blocked by courts — but USCIS proceeded with the SAVE updates anyway.

USCIS acknowledges in its own fact sheet that there are categories of foreign-born citizens who cannot be verified by SAVE.