WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ruled that a recently overhauled government tool at the center of the Trump administration’s election integrity push is unlawful and cannot continue to be used.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups who argued that recent upgrades to the program — known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — combined Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could lead to eligible voters being improperly removed from voter rolls.
“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,” Sooknanan wrote in her order. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The judge stated that Congress had explicitly forbidden the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information, and that the federal agencies behind the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”
The ruling represents a significant legal blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to use federal agencies to push states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls. The updated SAVE system — which critics had called an unlawful centralized federal voter database — had been a cornerstone of the second election-related executive order Trump signed this year. The court’s decision leaves the program’s future in doubt.
James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, responded to the ruling on social media, writing: “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.” The department pointed to his post as its official comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
The SAVE program was originally established under an immigration law requiring the Department of Homeland Security to assist federal, state, and local agencies in preventing government benefits from reaching noncitizens. After the Trump administration significantly expanded the program’s capabilities in April 2025, at least 25 states began using it to review their voter rolls. Since then, more than 67 million voter registrations have been run through the system. Critics have raised concerns that the program could end up stripping legitimate voters of their registration.
The plaintiffs in the case — which included the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and five unnamed U.S. citizens — alleged that the updated SAVE program violated both privacy and voting rights. They also claimed the Trump administration broke federal privacy laws by failing to meet transparency requirements when making changes to the system.
In her written ruling, the judge noted that the agencies involved were “scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections,” adding that “they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
During an October court hearing, plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus argued that naturalized citizens face a heightened risk of being wrongly removed from voter rolls. “They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus, who represents Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Following Monday’s ruling, Sus called the decision an “across the board victory” and said the plaintiffs were pleased that the judge reinforced the argument that the federal government does not have implied authority to freely share sensitive personal data between agencies.
