De-escalation: Judge Sooknanan blocks SAVE voter checks

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Trump administration’s revamped federal database for checking voter citizenship is unlawful and barred it from further use to verify eligibility. Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan vacated the 2025 modifications to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program and the related records notices, restoring the system to its pre‑overhaul state. She found the changes violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act’s limits on sharing Social Security numbers, and administrative law by exceeding agency authority and skipping required procedures.

The overhaul had turned a benefits‑eligibility tool into a mass citizenship checker by adding records for American‑born citizens, linking Social Security data, and enabling bulk searches using names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, with free access for election officials. The court said Congress forbids centralized troves of Americans’ identifying data and described agencies “haphazardly” combining information they knew was unreliable, with internal warnings that naturalized citizens were especially at risk of wrongful cancellation.

States had already run tens of millions of registrations through the system: between more than 60 million and at least 67 million since April 2025, across at least 25 states. About 21,000 registrations were flagged as possible noncitizens, and some U.S. citizens were wrongly removed from voter rolls. The order halts further use of the upgraded tool for voter‑eligibility checks.

AI-synthesized from multiple reported sources