A federal judge has put the brakes on the Trump administration’s plan to build a national database linking Social Security numbers and citizenship status, ruling that the government knowingly fed flawed information to states now aggressively and carelessly removing suspected non-citizens from voter rolls.
The federal government has willfully violated the privacy of American citizens, endangering the fundamental right to vote, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote in a blistering 75-page decision. This court will not stand by while that happens, she added.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
Sooknanan, appointed by President Joe Biden, ruled in a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups. She found that the administration’s revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system illegally merges citizenship data and other sensitive information from the Social Security Administration into a clearinghouse Congress has explicitly banned.
Since launching his second term, President Donald Trump has pushed sweeping changes to U.S. elections, but federal judges have blocked many of them. The administration demanded full voter rolls from dozens of states and lost nine lawsuits when it tried to enforce that demand.
Sooknanan determined that federal agencies were acting on a March 25, 2025, executive order directing Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create a system for state and local officials to check the immigration status of registered voters or those signing up to vote.
She found the new system violates multiple privacy laws, including the Social Security Act of 1935, which bars disclosing Social Security numbers and other data, and the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits non-consensual information sharing between federal agencies.
Despite knowing the database contained inaccuracies, the administration shared it with states, which then used it to scrub their voter rolls, Sooknanan said.
Since then, states have run their voter rolls through the modified SAVE system, and some of the plaintiffs’ members have been wrongly flagged as non-citizens, leading to the cancellation of their voter registrations, she wrote.
