Voting booths in Bangor, Maine
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A federal judge has declared a Trump administration initiative, which compiled personal data of Americans to verify voter eligibility, as unlawful. The data tool resulting from this initiative cannot be utilized in its current form.
Several states have already processed their entire voter lists through this system, known as SAVE, which was revamped by the Trump administration the previous year. Although the tool is designed to identify potential noncitizens and deceased voters, it has incorrectly flagged many foreign-born American citizens as potential noncitizens.
“The federal government has knowingly infringed upon the privacy rights of American citizens, thereby threatening their fundamental right to vote,” U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, appointed by Biden, stated in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot merely stand by while this occurs.”
NPR was the first to report on the federal government’s considerable expansion of SAVE, transforming it into a tool to verify the citizenship of all Americans, without adhering to the required protocols for public notice under the Privacy Act.
SAVE gets an overhaul
SAVE, managed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was previously used by state and federal agencies to confirm whether a foreign-born individual qualified for certain government benefits. These checks were conducted individually.
The previous year, the Department of Homeland Security, with the assistance of DOGE, enabled bulk checks on SAVE. Additional modifications linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and included records of American-born citizens.
In her ruling, Sooknanan noted that in conducting this overhaul, federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
Under Sooknanan’s directive, the revised SAVE tool can no longer be used. However, the Trump administration had already made SAVE checks a central part of its voting and elections agenda.
On March 31, Trump signed an executive order that instructs the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data to create a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters in each state. Legal challenges are in progress to stop the executive order.
An earlier executive order from March 2025 mandated that DHS provide free access to a verification tool to check the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters. Although parts of that order were blocked by courts, USCIS continued with updates to the SAVE system.
More than 60 million voter records
In April of this year, then-USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser reported that over 60 million voters had their records run through the updated SAVE system, with 21,000 — less than 1% — flagged as potential noncitizens.
Trump and his administration have prioritized restricting voting by noncitizens, even though it is already prohibited under federal law, and research shows it to be extremely rare.
The White House referred NPR to DHS for comment. A DHS spokesperson pointed to a post by the department’s general counsel, James Percival, on X.
“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s [sic] latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” wrote Percival, in a post that misspelled the judge’s name.
The federal government retains the option to appeal the ruling.
The Department of Justice, representing DHS in the lawsuit, provided NPR with a statement: “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 lacked the statutory authority to overhaul SAVE. She concluded that the expanded SAVE system violated the Privacy, Social Security, and Administrative Procedure acts.
“Today’s decision is a resounding victory for voters,” Marcia Johnson, of the League of Women Voters, one of the plaintiffs in the case, stated. “Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”
Last year, after the lawsuit challenging the SAVE overhaul was filed, DHS and SSA issued retroactive notices about the changes already made to SAVE. These notices received tens of thousands of negative comments, but the federal agencies did not alter their plans.
“They just didn’t listen to the American people who spoke out against this plan,” said Nikhel Sus, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, representing plaintiffs in the case. “And now we have a court saying, you know, exactly what these commenters were saying, which is that this is an unlawful, unreliable system and it needs to be shut down unless and until Congress authorizes it.”
In December, NPR reported on Anthony Nel’s case, a South African-born U.S. citizen who was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter list through SAVE. Nel was removed from the rolls after failing to respond promptly to a letter asking him to verify his citizenship at his local county election office. He later submitted a declaration in the lawsuit.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledges in its fact sheet that some categories of foreign-born citizens cannot be verified by SAVE.
Nel expressed that the ruling barring the use of the revised SAVE tool was a “step in the right direction” for voting and privacy rights.
Since NPR first covered his story, Nel renewed his passport and presented it to county election officials, which led to his reinstatement on the voter rolls. He participated in Texas’s primary and runoff elections this spring.
“After my right to vote was put in jeopardy by the system, I now have even more appreciation for my right to vote,” Nel said. “And I plan on voting in every single possible election, no matter how small, for the foreseeable future.”
