A Biden-appointed federal judge on Monday struck down the Trump administration's expanded citizenship database, halting a tool DHS used to help states identify and remove noncitizens from voter rolls.
The system had already been used to run more than 67 million registered voters through a citizenship check. Now that work is in limbo.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, seated in Washington, D.C., and appointed by President Biden in January 2025, issued a 75-page ruling finding that the Trump administration violated three federal laws when it overhauled the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. She ordered DHS to roll back every modification to the system and restore it to its pre-overhaul state.
SAVE was originally a narrow immigration-status tool, carrying records on roughly 26.5 million noncitizens. Under a Trump executive order, DHS transformed it into something far broader: a national citizenship lookup database, cross-referenced with Social Security Administration records and opened up to state and local election officials for bulk voter-roll checks. The administration did it without going through the standard public notice and comment process. Sooknanan found that secrecy central to the problem. The changes, she ruled, violated the Social Security Act's prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers, the 1974 Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
She described the revised system as "contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious." She also raised the risk of "defamatory" data being disseminated: the database flagged thousands of voters as potential noncitizens, and investigations in multiple states found that a meaningful number of those flags landed on actual U.S. citizens. The judge wrote that the administration had "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote."
The ruling lands hardest on Republican-led states that moved quickly to use the expanded SAVE database. Mostly-red states ran the bulk of those 67 million voter records through the system, and thousands of registrations were flagged as potentially ineligible. With the database now vacated, the legal footing for any pending voter removals based on those SAVE results is shaky at best. States that already sent removal notices will need to decide whether to proceed on their own evidence or pause and wait out any appeal.
The suit was filed by voting-rights nonprofits who argued the database was a vehicle for suppressing legitimate voters. That framing will be contested sharply. The administration built the system specifically to help states comply with federal law requiring them to maintain accurate voter rolls and remove ineligible registrants, including noncitizens, before elections. Those are not fringe goals. They are statutory obligations.
The Appeal the Administration Has to File
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is the next stop, and a challenge from the administration is all but certain given its record on election-integrity litigation. No appeal had been filed as of Monday. The timing is the problem: the 2026 midterm cycle is already running, and if the D.C. Circuit doesn't act quickly, the tool sits idle through the election regardless of how the legal argument ultimately resolves.
Conservatives have a legitimate objection to the ruling's underlying logic. The federal government cross-references agency databases constantly, and the original purpose of SAVE was always to verify legal status in federally administered programs. Expanding that function to voter-roll verification is a policy question, not an obviously unconstitutional one. Sooknanan's ruling rests heavily on procedural grounds: the administration skipped the notice-and-comment process required before making changes of this scale. That is an argument for doing it correctly, not for prohibiting it permanently, and it is the precise argument the administration will carry to the appeals court.
What a Biden appointee decided Monday is that the administration moved too fast and too quietly. The D.C. Circuit will determine whether that is fatal or fixable. Until then, states working to clean their voter rolls before November are operating with one fewer tool, and the registrations already flagged are caught in legal uncertainty with the midterms closing in.
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