A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s overhaul of an immigration verification system to check voter eligibility across the nation, striking down a central pillar of the government’s efforts to exercise more federal control over elections.
The judge cited Texas’ use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which flagged several voters who were actually citizens as noncitizens, as evidence that it threatened both privacy and voting rights less than five months before the November midterm election.
“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
Sooknanan’s decision does not eliminate SAVE, a decades-old immigration-status verification program. But it blocks the Trump administration’s 2025 overhaul of the system, which made it easier for states to check their voter rolls against the federal database, which includes individuals’ citizenship status and Social Security numbers.
Election officials have found that the modified database, however, is prone to error, something Sooknanan referenced in her decision. Federal officials, she wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The ruling could strengthen challenges by voters who were removed, flagged, or placed under review by the system.
“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” the judge wrote.
