{"id":17041,"date":"2026-06-22T21:01:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T21:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=17041"},"modified":"2026-06-22T21:01:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T21:01:42","slug":"judge-blocks-use-of-federal-database-to-check-citizenship-saying-it-could-wrongly-purge-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=17041","title":{"rendered":"Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By ALI SWENSON and FATIMA HUSSEIN<\/strong><\/p>\n

WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration\u2019s election integrity strategy is unlawful and can no longer be used.<\/p>\n

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U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans\u2019 sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll 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,\u201d Sooknanan said in an order explaining the decision. \u201cThis Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans\u2019 personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program \u201cknew that the database violates those statutory protections.\u201d<\/p>\n

The decision is a major\u00a0legal setback\u00a0for President Donald Trump in\u00a0his efforts\u00a0to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide\u00a0crackdown on noncitizens illegally\u00a0on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the\u00a0second election executive order\u00a0the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,\u201d James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.<\/p>\n

The department referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/div>\n

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then,\u00a0at least 67 million registrations\u00a0have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans\u2019 privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,\u201d the judge wrote. \u201cSo they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThey are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,\u201d said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.<\/p>\n

Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan\u2019s ruling as an \u201cacross the board victory\u201d and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge\u2019s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn\u2019t have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.<\/p>\n

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Swenson reported from New York.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal judge ruled the SAVE program unlawful, citing privacy concerns over its centralized database of voter information and personal data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-based-on-facts-either-observed-and-verified-directly-by-the-reporter-or-reported-and-verified-from-knowledgeable-sources","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nJudge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters - Silicon Valley Moving Post<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=17041\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters - 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