A federal judge in Washington D.C. has blocked the Department of Homeland Security from using its modified Trump Voter Database to remove people from voter registration rolls, halting a nationwide program that had already been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan issued the 75-page ruling on Monday and ordered the agencies to return the system and related notices to their status quo before the changes.
The decision matters now because the expanded SAVE system was not a narrow fix. After Donald Trump’s March 25 executive order directed DHS to overhaul SAVE, the government moved quickly to turn a database that once held immigration-status information for roughly 26.5 million people into a mass voter-verification tool that allowed bulk searches using partial Social Security numbers and was made freely available to state and local election officials. Sooknanan said the agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, and that they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans.
In granting summary judgment, Sooknanan said the changes violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. She wrote that the Court sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority and without observance of procedure required by law. The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters, which led a coalition of voting and privacy advocates challenging the overhaul last year, and it also named DHS, the Social Security Administration and other federal actors.
The ruling also cuts against the government’s own results. The expanded program flagged thousands of voters as potential noncitizens, but later checks showed many of those people were in fact citizens eligible to vote. The program mostly affected voters in Republican-led states, underscoring how broad the database sweep had become even before the court intervened. Sooknanan had declined to issue a stay last November, and on Monday she went further, setting aside both the modified system and the System of Records Notices filed after the updates.
That leaves DHS with the judgment itself and a harder question: whether it will try to appeal, or rebuild the system in another form that can survive the same legal tests. For now, the judge’s order stops the Trump Voter Database from being used as a purge tool and restores SAVE to the narrower system it was before the overhaul.
