Blistering new ruling finds Trump's agencies 'knowingly trampled' on a sacred right

A federal judge on Monday struck down the Trump administration's revamped voter-citizenship database, ruling that federal agencies broke the law by building a centralized system that swept up the private data of millions of Americans and wrongly flagged U.S. citizens as non-citizens.

In a sharply worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan vacated the 2025 overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, along with two related privacy notices issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. She found the changes violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

"[T]he 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."

The overhaul followed President Donald Trump's March 2025 executive order on elections that expanded SAVE to include records of natural-born citizens, tap Social Security data including SSNs, as well as let states run their entire voter rolls through the system in bulk.

The judge, an appointee of President Joe Biden, noted internal records showed the agencies knew the database was "not in compliance" with the Privacy Act and that accuracy shortfalls "could cause incomplete or false results." Naturalized citizens with outdated Social Security files were among those wrongly flagged as non-citizens, with some forced to prove citizenship within 30 days or lose their registrations. An investigation in one Texas county found a quarter of the system's "non-citizen matches" were people who had already proven citizenship, the court filing detailed.

The case, brought by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, follows months of warnings about the error-prone system, which even several red states refused to feed their voter data.