Judge blocks Trump plan to use immigration database on voter rolls

A federal judge in Washington blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped immigration database to check state voter rolls, dealing a sharp setback to a push that would have tied election administration more tightly to federal immigration records. In a 75-page decision, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan sided with voting-rights and privacy groups as states prepared for the November 3, 2026 general election, when control of both chambers of Congress is at stake.

At issue was the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database, a system U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says was designed to verify immigration and citizenship status for federal, state, territorial, tribal and local agencies. The administration expanded it last year to allow bulk searches, and DHS privacy filings also show new access to full and truncated Social Security numbers, U.S. passport numbers, driver’s license numbers and data from the Social Security Administration. DHS announced a comprehensive optimization of SAVE on April 22, 2025, saying it would become a single, reliable source for verifying non-citizen status nationwide.

Judge Sooknanan’s ruling turned on the risk that the overhaul made the system less accurate, not more. USCIS’s own voter-registration fact sheet says SAVE cannot verify information on citizens born in the United States, a limitation that plaintiffs said made it a poor tool for mass voter-roll maintenance. They argued that scaling up the database could generate false positives, wrongly identify lawful voters as noncitizens and, in some cases, lead to improper removals from the rolls.

The challenge was brought on September 30, 2025, by the League of Women Voters, the League of Women Voters of Louisiana, the League of Women Voters of Virginia, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five individuals, later expanding into a broader attack on the system’s use in election administration. Public-interest groups say the expanded process has already been used to check more than 67 million voter registrations, mostly in Republican-led states, and that at least 22 states had used SAVE to verify voter citizenship in bulk by early 2026.

The White House said Executive Order 14248 directed DHS to strengthen voter citizenship verification for federal elections, but the ruling interrupts a fast-moving federal-state experiment at a moment when registration lists are already being built and contested. The fight now reaches beyond one database: it goes to who gets to decide election rules, how far immigration enforcement can reach into the voting process, and how much risk society is willing to accept that lawful voters will be wrongly flagged in the name of security.