The Department of Justice asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to lift an order blocking the Trump administration from using a revamped federal immigration database to scrub state voter registration lists — a system that has already flagged thousands of eligible American citizens as potential noncitizens.
The emergency petition, filed by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, came just days after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to uphold U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s June injunction blocking the administration’s overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE. By bypassing the appellate process and going directly to the justices, the administration is pressing the Supreme Court’s conservative-appointed majority to intervene before November’s midterms.
From benefits checks to bulk voter data
SAVE was originally designed to verify whether foreign-born individuals were eligible for federal benefit programs — one record at a time. With help from DOGE, the Department of Homeland Security overhauled the system to allow bulk queries and linked it to Social Security Administration records for the first time, making it possible to run entire state voter rolls through the database at once. Several Republican-led states quickly signed agreements with DHS and began canceling voter registrations flagged by the system.
Before Sooknanan’s block, the Trump administration had used SAVE to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters, according to Democracy Docket, a voting-rights legal organization. Thousands were flagged as potential noncitizens — but further investigation found that most were actually eligible voters.
A system the court called unreliable
In her 75-page June ruling, Sooknanan found the overhaul violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Federal agencies had, she wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The evidence from Texas illustrated the problem. After the state ran its voter list through SAVE, 2,724 people were flagged as potential noncitizens and sent letters demanding proof of citizenship. In Travis County alone, officials confirmed at least 11 of 97 flagged voters were in fact U.S. citizens. Voting rights advocates say the database is particularly prone to error for naturalized citizens, because SAVE often doesn’t update when immigrants complete the naturalization process.
NPR reported on one Texas voter, Anthony Nel — born in South Africa, a U.S. citizen since his teens when his parents naturalized — who was removed from the rolls after missing a letter instructing him to prove his citizenship. He was eventually reinstated after presenting his passport and has since voted in Texas primary and runoff elections.
Administration: courts are threatening election integrity
Sauer told the Supreme Court that Sooknanan’s order was “indefensible” and that it “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.” He also argued that the voting rights and privacy organizations that filed the case — including the League of Women Voters — had no legal standing to challenge the SAVE overhaul in the first place.
DHS General Counsel James Percival was blunter after the June ruling, posting online: “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”
A crowded emergency docket
The petition goes first to Chief Justice John Roberts, who by default handles emergency applications from D.C. Circuit cases; he can also refer it to the full court. The SAVE case is one of several election disputes already on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket ahead of November, alongside challenges to a GOP-drawn congressional map in Missouri and the administration’s restrictions on mail-in voting.
The administration’s stated aim is to prevent noncitizens from voting — a form of fraud that research and state audits have consistently found to be exceedingly rare. Critics say the rushed and error-ridden approach risks the opposite: stripping eligible American voters off the rolls before they can prove their citizenship and cast a ballot.