A federal judge has struck down the newly expanded version of a key federal database at the heart of President Donald Trump’s push to nationalize voter‑verification efforts, ruling that the upgraded SAVE system violated Americans’ privacy rights and could lead to eligible voters being wrongly purged from state rolls.
In a sweeping decision issued Monday, US District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with civil‑rights and privacy groups who argued that the revamped Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements aggregated sensitive personal data in ways Congress had explicitly forbidden.
“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,” the judge wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The ruling is a significant setback for Trump’s second‑term agenda, which has leaned heavily on federal agencies to pursue what he calls a nationwide crackdown on noncitizens illegally appearing on voter rolls. The modified SAVE system criticized by opponents as an unlawful centralized voter database had been a cornerstone of Trump’s second election‑related executive order.
The Department of Homeland Security pushed back immediately. General counsel James Percival wrote on social media that “the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.” The Justice Department said it would continue defending the administration’s immigration‑enforcement strategy and DHS’s use of SAVE.
But critics note that noncitizen voting is already illegal, extremely rare, and punishable by felony charges that can lead to deportation. They argue the administration’s sweeping verification efforts risk disenfranchising legitimate voters a concern underscored by real‑world cases.
One such voter, Anthony Nel, a naturalized US citizen originally from South Africa, had his Texas registration wrongly canceled after the state ran its voter file through SAVE. “I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for granted,” he said.
The SAVE program was originally designed to help government agencies prevent noncitizens from receiving federal benefits. But after Trump expanded its search capabilities in 2025, at least 25 states used it to scan more than 67 million voter registrations, raising alarms among privacy advocates.
The plaintiffs including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and several unnamed citizens argued that the administration violated federal privacy laws and transparency rules by rushing through changes to comply with Trump’s executive order.
Judge Sooknanan agreed, writing that agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
With the ruling, the future of the revamped SAVE system is now uncertain and so is the administration’s broader effort to reshape how elections are run across the country.
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