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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
[He was booted by SAVE, and joined the lawsuit that resulted in the OP.]