ANALYSIS
Court blocks Trump’s system of removing non-citizens from voter roll over alleged privacy violations
James Perciva, general counsel for the DHS, reacted harshly to the ruling, stating that “it’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.” In his eyes, the judge’s decision “is just the latest example.”
People vote at a polling place in Los Angeles.
A federal judge blocked the implementation of a system promoted by the Trump administration designed to cross-reference massive amounts of data on millions of Americans in order to identify and remove non-citizen voters from voter rolls.
In a ruling spanning 75 pages, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, appointed by Joe Biden, ruled that the federal government “has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
Judicial setback for electoral integrity
The judge ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the activist group League of Women Voters and other civil rights advocacy groups. According to her ruling, the updated version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Benefits (SAVE), operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), combines citizenship information with Social Security data, creating a central repository that Congress has expressly prohibited.
“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,” Sooknanan wrote. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The modified SAVE system is one of the key pillars of the second executive order on elections signed by the Republican president earlier this year.
DHS criticizes Judge Sooknanan’s ruling
This decision represents a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his attempt to use federal agencies to push for a nationwide purge of non-citizen voters who are illegally listed on state voter rolls.
James Perciva, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), reacted harshly to the ruling and stated on X that “it’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.” In his eyes, the judge’s decision “is just the latest example.”
The SAVE program was created under an immigration law that requires DHS to assist federal, state, and local agencies in preventing government benefits from reaching non-citizens.
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