A federal judge on Monday barred the Trump administration from letting states query a centralized national database of citizens built for checking immigration status to screen their voter rolls, finding that the repurposing of the federal data to monitor voting violated at least three laws.
In a sharply worded ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ordered the Homeland Security Department to stop permitting states to search the data, which also incorporates Social Security records.
President Trump had ordered several agencies last year to pool data that states could use to verify citizenship. The combined data set allows state and local election officials to search immigration records stored by the Department of Homeland Security about migrants, as well as a much larger database of information maintained by the Social Security Administration.
Judge Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote that the executive order had resulted in a rush by agencies to “haphazardly” adopt a system that they knew was flawed and that would flag eligible voters along with those who might have registered illegally. She warned that states were already “actively” using it to potentially purge eligible voters ahead of an election.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote. “This court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
Repurposing the immigration database — known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system — into a tool to check voter eligibility unlawfully abused sensitive data stored by the government for other purposes, Judge Sooknanan wrote. She added that federal agencies were joining to together over the last year to “create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status and other sensitive data” that violated protections Congress had intended to guard personal data.
Judge Sooknanan wrote that evidence presented in the case showed Homeland Security Department officials acknowledged in internal communications that the infrastructure it had built violated federal privacy law and could incorrectly flag eligible voters as noncitizens. She wrote, for instance, that the database included outdated information that could result in naturalized citizens who had been assigned Social Security numbers long ago incorrectly appearing as ineligible to vote.
James Percival, the general counsel for the Homeland Security Department, responded to the ruling on social media, calling it the “latest example” of “how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”
At Mr. Trump’s direction, the federal government has intensified efforts this year to intervene in state administration of elections, as he pushes discredited theories about voter fraud and claims that undocumented immigrants and others who are ineligible to vote can be found on state rolls.
The Justice Department has also contributed to efforts to build a national voter database, suing a number of Democratic-led states that resisted the push to obtain their records.
Earlier on Monday, a federal judge in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit by the department seeking the state’s voter records, the latest of more than half a dozen decisions that have gone against the Trump administration.
The lawsuit before Judge Sooknanan dates to an executive order Mr. Trump signed in March 2025 requiring more aggressive federal oversight of elections, inserting the federal government into roles historically reserved for states. Among other things, the order required the Homeland Security Department and the Social Security Administration to collaborate to verify the immigration status of registered voters or new voters signing up.
The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and several members of those organizations who argued the Trump administration had unlawfully pooled their sensitive personal data into a tool that could be abused for voter suppression.
“As the Trump-Vance administration continues its attack on the right to vote, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” said Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, which helped represent the coalition.
In November, Judge Sooknanan had initially denied a request by the groups to halt the overhaul of the SAVE system, writing that while she “doubts the lawfulness of the government’s actions,” it was unclear that the Trump administration had actually misused the data. But on Monday, she wrote that states, including Texas and Louisiana, have now started using the system to check voter registrations and had flagged eligible voters for removal.
Separately, at Mr. Trump’s direction, the U.S. Postal Service this month submitted a plan under which it could refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that decline to share their voter rolls with the federal government. The Postal Service is also facing pressure to assist with the creation of state-by-state voter lists that it could consult and use to justify refusing mail-in ballots of people left off the lists.
In May, Judge Carl J. Nichols declined to immediately block the Homeland Security Department from compiling and distributing those lists to state election workers.
The post Federal Citizenship Data Tool Cannot Be Used to Screen Voters, Judge Rules appeared first on New York Times.
