Voting booths in Bangor, Maine
CJ Gunther/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
CJ Gunther/Getty Images
A federal judge on Monday ruled that a Trump administration project to aggregate Americans’ personal data to check voter eligibility is unlawful, and the resulting data tool cannot be used in its current form.
Several states have already run their entire voter lists through the system, known as SAVE, that was overhauled by the Trump administration last year. While the tool is supposed to flag potential noncitizens and deceased voters, a number of American citizens who are foreign-born have been mistakenly flagged as potential noncitizens by SAVE.
“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,” U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, wrote in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
NPR was the first outlet to report on the federal government’s massive expansion of SAVE to turn it into a tool to check the citizenship of all Americans, and how the government had not followed required protocols to provide public notice under the Privacy Act.
SAVE gets an overhaul
SAVE is run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and was previously used by state and federal agencies to check whether a foreign-born individual was eligible for certain government benefits. Those checks were done one by one.
Last year, USCIS’ parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with the help of DOGE, made it possible to perform bulk checks on SAVE. Further changes linked SAVE to Social Security Administration data for the first time and added the records of American-born citizens.
Sooknanan wrote in her ruling that in performing 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 order, the overhauled SAVE tool can no longer be used. But the Trump administration had already made SAVE checks central to its voting and elections agenda.
For instance, on March 31, Trump signed an executive order that, among its provisions, directs the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data to generate a list of eligible U.S. citizen voters in each state. Legal challenges are aiming to halt the executive order.
An earlier executive order from March 2025 included a mandate that DHS provide free access to a verification tool to check the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters. Parts of that order were stopped by courts, but USCIS proceeded with updates to the SAVE system.
More than 60 million voter records
In April of this year, then-USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said more than 60 million voters had had their records run through the revamped SAVE system, and of those, 21,000 — less than 1% — had been flagged as potential noncitizens.
Trump and his administration have focused on curtailing voting by noncitizens, even though it is already against federal law, and as research and state reviews have found it extremely rare.
The White House referred NPR to DHS for comment. A DHS spokesperson responded by flagging a post the department’s general counsel, James Percival, wrote 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 can appeal the ruling.
Sooknanan’s order found that federal agencies did not have statutory authority to overhaul SAVE. She found the creation of the expanded SAVE 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, said in a statement. “Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”
Last year, after plaintiffs filed the lawsuit challenging the SAVE overhaul, DHS and SSA retroactively issued notices about the changes that had already been made to SAVE. The notices received tens of thousands of negative comments but the federal agencies did not modify 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, which represents 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.”
Last December, NPR wrote about the case of Anthony Nel, who was born in South Africa and acquired U.S. citizenship as a teenager when his parents became naturalized citizens. Nel was registered to vote in Texas but was among more than 2,700 individuals who were flagged as potential noncitizens after the state ran its voter list through SAVE.
Nel was removed from the rolls when he did not respond in time to a letter instructing him to prove his citizenship at his local county election office. He later filed a declaration in the lawsuit.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledges in its fact sheet that there are some categories of foreign-born citizens who cannot be verified by SAVE.
Nel told NPR that Monday’s ruling that bars the use of the revamped SAVE tool was a “step in the right direction” for voting and privacy rights.
Since NPR first profiled his story, he got his passport renewed and showed that to county election officials and was reinstated on the voter rolls. He voted in Texas 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.”
