Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters

Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters 1 of 2 | Voting booths are set up at a polling location inside St. Luke’s Methodist Church, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Nate Billings) 2 of 2 | President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House during an executive order signing about quantum computing, Monday, June 22, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) 1 of 2 | Voting booths are set up at a polling location inside St. Luke’s Methodist Church, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Nate Billings) 1 of 2 Voting booths are set up at a polling location inside St. Luke’s Methodist Church, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Nate Billings) Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share 2 of 2 | President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House during an executive order signing about quantum computing, Monday, June 22, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) 2 of 2 President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House during an executive order signing about quantum computing, Monday, June 22, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] Washington (AP) — A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s election integrity strategy is unlawful and can no longer be used.U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged 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 said in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.” The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain. 4 MIN READ 4 MIN READ 2 MIN READ “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post. The department referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls. The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.“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,” the judge wrote. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”