U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Monday set aside the Trump administration's overhaul of the SAVE system, halting a federal effort that she said unlawfully turned private information about Americans into a centralized database. The ruling lands immediately on a program built to verify citizenship and immigration status, and it stops the government from using the modified system as it had planned.
Sooknanan said the administration violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. She wrote that the government had haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data it knew to be unreliable, and said the agencies behind the effort had flunked compliance with laws Congress put in place decades ago.
The fight grew out of an executive order signed by President Trump last year that sought a new proof-of-citizenship requirement for people registering to vote. That order directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create a database that would let state and local officials verify whether a person was a citizen or had immigration status. The result was an overhaul of SAVE that added the records of natural-born citizens, opened access to Social Security Administration records including Social Security numbers and allowed bulk searches by entities using the system.
That change is what brought the case before the court. The League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five individuals said the Trump administration had turned SAVE into a searchable national citizenship data system and that some states had used it to run voter registration lists and purge people incorrectly identified as noncitizens from their rolls. The administration countered that it was simply carrying out a clear congressional directive to break down information silos between agencies and asked for the suit to be dismissed.
Sooknanan rejected that view in stark terms, saying the federal government had knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a way that threatened the sacred right to vote and that the court could not stand idly by while it happened. Her ruling does not say which states used the modified system or how many voters were wrongly removed, but it does leave the Trump administration with a simple choice: accept that the court has stopped the overhaul, or try to revive it through the next round of litigation.
