A DC federal judge blocked the Trump administration Monday from consulting a revamped federal database of Americans’ personal information, warning that the White House had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The Department of Homeland Security had recently upgraded its so-called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system in response to President Trump’s March 2025 executive order meant to safeguard national elections.
Following the order, DHS made changes to SAVE that included adding natural-born US citizens to the register, including Social Security records, and allowing bulk searches of the database.
“[D]ecades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank,” US District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan wrote in her 75-page opinion. “And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections.
“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” she added. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
White House officials reacted bitterly to Monday’s ruling, with DHS General Counsel James Percival writing on X: “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s [sic] latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!”
“Judge Sparkle decrees that America belongs to any random alien on planet earth, just like our founders intended,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller added sarcastically.
The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”
With Post wires