On Sept. 25, the divided Supreme Court let the Trump administration use a revamped immigration database to check individual voters’ citizenship at state and local officials’ request. Federal law bars mass voter-roll removals this close to November’s midterms.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the risk of burdening or disenfranchising even a few eligible voters outweighed the government’s harm from being blocked. In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had ruled the government violated privacy protections and included citizenship data it knew was unreliable; she cited naturalized Texans whose registrations were wrongly canceled after they did not respond quickly enough to a state confirmation request.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system has searched Department of Homeland Security immigration records since 2025; the administration revamped it for bulk searches and searches by Social Security number. Voting-rights groups and privacy advocates say the new system wrongly identifies some people as noncitizens and threatens privacy and voting rights. The administration says it complies with the law, argues the challengers have not shown sufficient harm, and says complaints about states’ use of the database should be brought against the states.
