A federal judge has halted the Trump administration’s efforts to expand a database containing millions of Americans’ personal information, ruling that the system violated privacy protections and posed risks to voting rights.
In a 75-page decision, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the administration had improperly merged Social Security records with citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security to create an updated version of the SAVE database, despite congressional restrictions. The judge accused the government of using inaccurate information that led states to “actively” and “haphazardly” remove individuals believed to be non-citizens from voter rolls.
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“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, adding that the court could not “stand idly by” while such actions continued.
The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters and several advocacy organizations, which argued that the administration’s revised database had already resulted in eligible voters being incorrectly identified as non-citizens and subsequently losing their voter registrations.
The ruling temporarily blocks a key component of President Donald Trump’s broader efforts to overhaul election procedures and advance his immigration agenda. Courts have previously challenged several of those initiatives, citing concerns that the administration was attempting to implement major election changes without congressional approval.
Judge Sooknanan concluded that the database violated protections under the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act by allowing states, including Texas and Louisiana, to access sensitive personal information and use it to screen voter rolls. She also said the consequences of misidentifying individuals as non-citizens could amount to defamation, dismissing the administration’s arguments minimizing the impact as “bordering on the absurd.”
The Departments of Homeland Security and Treasury had not responded publicly to the ruling. The decision immediately suspends the expanded SAVE system and is expected to be appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Democracy Forward, which represented some of the plaintiffs alongside the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, welcomed the ruling. Its president and chief executive officer, Skye Perryman, said the consolidation of sensitive information violated longstanding privacy laws designed to protect Americans’ personal data.
