A Biden-appointed federal judge halted the administration’s revamped SAVE system, ruling that its use for voter roll reviews raised accuracy and privacy concerns.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using an updated immigration database to review state voter rolls, stopping a federal effort aimed at helping state and local election officials check whether registered voters are U.S. citizens.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., issued the 75-page ruling against the administration’s revamped version of the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which is used to verify citizenship and immigration status.
Sooknanan, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sided with voting rights and privacy groups that challenged the changes. The groups argued that the overhaul made the database less reliable for election purposes and could lead to eligible voters being wrongly removed from voter rolls.
“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.”
DHS and the Justice Department, which represents the administration in court, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The ruling is a setback for President Donald Trump’s broader effort to expand the federal government’s role in election administration ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, when Republicans are fighting to keep control of both chambers of Congress.
Federal elections in the United States are administered by individual states. Trump and his allies have argued for years that states have not done enough to prevent voter fraud, while audits and academic studies have found that voter fraud is rare.
Trump has also continued to argue that fraud caused his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
Courts have repeatedly limited the administration’s attempts to impose new federal election rules. Three federal judges, in separate cases, have blocked Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricting how mail ballots are counted.
A March 2026 executive order limiting mail-in voting has also been challenged in court. Federal judges have also rejected nine lawsuits filed by the administration against 30 states and the District of Columbia after they refused to provide complete voter rolls to the federal government.
The SAVE system changes at issue in Monday’s ruling were made last year. The revised system allowed users to search many records at once and gave access to individuals’ Social Security numbers.
Several Republican-led states later compared their voter rolls against the database and canceled registrations for voters flagged as noncitizens.
The advocacy groups that sued, including the League of Women Voters, said some eligible voters were wrongly identified as noncitizens and removed from the rolls.
Voting rights advocates argued that the SAVE database can be outdated, particularly for immigrants who have become naturalized citizens and are eligible to vote but may still appear in records as noncitizens.
Sooknanan also ruled that the system’s overhaul violated privacy laws restricting the federal government’s disclosure of Social Security numbers and other personal information.
The decision leaves the administration’s voter roll verification effort on hold while legal challenges continue over how far the federal government can go in reshaping state-run election systems.
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