A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has tossed out the Trump administration's revamp of a federal data system that pooled Social Security numbers, citizenship designations and other sensitive records, ruling that the changes illegally centralized Americans' personal information and have already been used to knock citizens off voter rolls.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan said agencies "haphazardly combined" records as they rushed to follow a White House directive, creating a tool that threatened both privacy and the right to vote. In a 75-page memorandum opinion, she found that the updated Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, and she vacated the 2025 changes as arbitrary and capricious, according to CBS News.
How the executive order prompted the changes
The overhaul did not come out of nowhere. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to build tools to verify citizenship and reshape election administration. That directive kicked off the SAVE "modernization" project and told agencies to compile citizenship-verification tools for state and local election officials, according to the White House.
What the SAVE overhaul did
The 2025 SAVE overhaul expanded the system so federal databases could be searched in bulk and so the tool would pull from Social Security Administration records, including Social Security numbers, while also sweeping in records for natural-born citizens. Critics said that turned what had been an eligibility-check system into something that looked a lot like a national citizenship lookup.
CBS News reported that plaintiffs argued those shifts effectively transformed SAVE into a searchable national citizenship data system. "The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information," Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement quoted by CBS.
Who sued and why
The League of Women Voters, several of its state affiliates, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five individual plaintiffs sued the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Justice. They argued the agencies pooled protected records without giving proper notice or following procedures required by law.
Their filings and background materials lay out detailed claims that the government sidestepped statutory privacy protections and voting-rights safeguards. Those documents are available from EPIC and the League of Women Voters.
Real-world effects already reported
On paper, SAVE was billed as a verification aid. In practice, states were already running voter lists through the overhauled system and then moving to cancel registrations or launch investigations based on its matches.
Court filings cited by Democracy Docket show Travis County officials in Texas reporting that about 25 percent of matches flagged by a SAVE check were tied to state driver's-license records, and state officials in Texas, Tennessee and Louisiana have reported thousands of flagged registrants.
Next steps and legal stakes
The federal government can appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Justice Department lawyers had argued that only a small number of naturalized voters might be misclassified by the revamped database.
Judge Sooknanan brushed that aside as a "red herring" and warned that spreading unreliable citizenship data across government systems can cause real harm, particularly when it is used to question voter eligibility. Those findings are laid out in detail in the memorandum opinion, as published by CourtListener.
