Big Blow to Trump and the GOP: Judge Blocks Bid to Screen Voter Rolls With Immigration Data

A federal judge dealt a major blow on Monday to the electoral aspirations of President Donald Trump and the Republicans by prohibiting the White House from using an updated immigration database to verify state voter rolls. The ban came just over four months before the midterms that promise to be close.

The decision was handed down by District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, based in Washington, D.C., who ruled in favor of the voter rights and privacy advocacy groups that had challenged the measure. In a 75-page ruling, the judge—appointed by the former Democratic president Joe Biden— argued that the modified tool had become less reliable and threatened to exclude eligible voters.

The system in question, called SAVE, allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to verify a person’s citizenship and immigration status. Last year, the agency reconfigured the system so that state and local authorities could access it more easily and thus confirm that those listed in the registries were U.S. citizens. That update enabled mass searches of records and opened access to citizens’ Social Security numbers—a move the judge deemed a violation of existing privacy laws.

“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. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The DHS did not hesitate to reject the ruling. Its chief legal counsel, James Percival, sarcastically commented in a statement on the left’s efforts “to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist” and framed the ruling as a new obstacle to the government’s attempts to curb voting by foreigners

The setback adds to a string of legal defeats for the White House on this issue. Three federal judges have already blocked, in separate cases, the 2025 executive order that required proof of citizenship to register to vote and limited the counting of mail-in ballots. Another March 2026 order on mail-in voting is also facing challenges, and the courts have dismissed nine of the lawsuits the administration filed against 30 states and the District of Columbia that refused to hand over their complete voter rolls.

Federal elections are administered by each state. Trump and his allies have long argued that state authorities are not doing enough to combat voter fraud, while Democrats and critics maintain that the allegations are exaggerated or false.

The consequences of cross-referencing data are already being felt on the ground. Since the SAVE update, several Republican-governed states have compared their rolls with the database and canceled the registrations of voters flagged as non-citizens. The League of Women Voters, one of the organizations filing the lawsuit, warned that the system may be outdated and ends up flagging naturalized immigrants—who have full voting rights—as non-citizens.