Voting booths in Bangor, Maine
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A federal judge ruled Monday that a Trump administration project to aggregate Americans’ personal data to verify voter eligibility is illegal and that the resulting data tool cannot be used in its current form.
Several states have already put their entire voter rolls through the system, known as SAVE, which was overhauled by the Trump administration last year. While the tool is supposed to flag potential noncitizens and deceased voters, SAVE has erroneously flagged several foreign-born U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens.
“Overall, the federal government has knowingly trampled the privacy rights of American citizens in a way that threatens the sacred right to vote,” U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand by while that happens.”
NPR was the first outlet to report on the federal government’s massive expansion of SAVE into a tool to verify the citizenship of all Americans, and how the government had not followed required protocols for providing public notices under the Privacy Act.
SAVE is renewed
SAVE is administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and was previously used by state and federal agencies to verify whether a foreign-born person was eligible for certain government benefits. These controls were done one by one.
Last year, USCIS’ parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with the help of DOGE, made it possible to conduct mass checks on SAVE. Other changes linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and added records of citizens born in the United States.
Sooknanan wrote in his ruling that in conducting this review, federal agencies “randomly combined and reused the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
According to Sooknanan’s order, the revised SAVE tool can no longer be used. But the Trump administration had already made SAVE checks a central element of its election and voting agenda.
For example, on March 31, Trump signed an executive order that, among its provisions, directs the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data to generate a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters in each state. The legal challenges aim to stop the executive order.
A previous executive order from March 2025 included a mandate for DHS to provide free access to a verification tool to verify the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters. The courts halted parts of that order, but USCIS continued updates to the SAVE system.
More than 60 million voter registrations
In April of this year, then-USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser said that more than 60 million voters had had their records reviewed through the revamped SAVE system, and of those, 21,000 (less than 1%) had been flagged as potential noncitizens.
Trump and his administration have focused on restricting noncitizen voting, even though it is already against federal law, and as state investigations and reviews have found it extremely rare.
The White House referred NPR to DHS for comment. A DHS spokesperson responded by flagging a post that the department’s general counsel, James Percival, wrote on X.
“It’s amazing how hard the left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist don’t exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan [sic] “The latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing foreign voting is just the latest example!” wrote Percival, in a post that misspelled the judge’s name.
The federal government can appeal the ruling.
The Department of Justice, which represents DHS in the lawsuit, sent NPR a statement saying, “The Department will continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
Sooknanan’s order determined that federal agencies had no legal authority to reform SAVE. It found that the creation of the expanded SAVE violated the Privacy, Social Security and Administrative Procedure laws.
“Today’s decision is a resounding victory for voters,” Marcia Johnson of the League of Women Voters, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”
Last year, after plaintiffs filed suit challenging the SAVE overhaul, DHS and SSA issued retroactive notices about changes that had already been made to SAVE. The ads received tens of thousands of negative comments but federal agencies did not change their plans.
“They just didn’t listen to the American people who spoke out against this plan,” said Nikhel Sus, an attorney with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who represents the plaintiffs in the case. “And now we have a court saying, you know, exactly what these commentators were saying, which is that this is an illegal and unreliable system and it should be shut down unless and until Congress authorizes it.”
Last December, NPR wrote about the case of Anthony Nel, who was born in South Africa and acquired U.S. citizenship as a teenager when his parents naturalized. Nel was registered to vote in Texas, but was among more than 2,700 people who were flagged as potential noncitizens after the state reviewed its voter list through SAVE.
Nel was removed from the rolls when he did not respond in time to a letter ordering him to prove his citizenship at his local county elections office. He later filed a statement in the lawsuit.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledges in its fact sheet that there are some categories of foreign-born citizens that SAVE cannot verify.
Nel told NPR that Monday’s ruling banning use of the revamped SAVE tool was a “step in the right direction” for voting and privacy rights.
Since NPR first described his story, he renewed his passport and showed it to county election officials and was reinstated on the voter rolls. He voted in the Texas primary and runoff elections this spring.
“After the system jeopardized my right to vote, I now appreciate my right to vote even more,” Nel said. “And I plan to vote in every possible election, no matter how small, for the foreseeable future.”
