# Federal judge blocks Trump citizenship verification system as privacy violation  
**Published:** 2026-06-22T22:51:48.000Z  
**Source:** [Nebraska Examiner](https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/06/22/repub/trump-trampled-voter-privacy-by-feeding-info-into-homeland-security-system-judge-says/)  
**AI-generated:** yes (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001)  
**Canonical:** https://lincolne.news/article/federal-judge-blocks-trump-citizenship-verification-system-as-privacy-violation

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration's revamped voter verification system, ruling it illegally consolidated millions of Americans' sensitive personal data in violation of federal privacy laws. [U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of Washington, D.C., found](https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/06/22/repub/trump-trampled-voter-privacy-by-feeding-info-into-homeland-security-system-judge-says/) that the system, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or SAVE, violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The decision dealt a significant blow to the administration's election strategy ahead of November's midterms.

The 75-page ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which challenged the Trump administration's overhaul of SAVE. [Originally created in 1987 as a tool to verify immigration status for government benefits,](https://campaignlegal.org/update/what-save-system) the system was radically repurposed last year to enable bulk searches of voter rolls across multiple federal databases. Judge Sooknanan found the federal government "haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."

The SAVE database expansion was central to President Trump's efforts to identify and remove noncitizens from state voter rolls. [Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen handed over sensitive voter data to federal authorities in February following a state Supreme Court ruling,](https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/02/12/nebraska-hands-over-sensitive-voter-data-to-doj-during-legal-fight/) including names, addresses, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. At least 25 states have used the expanded SAVE system since April 2025, and approximately 67 million voter registrations have been scanned through the program.

However, the system has proven error-prone. The judge noted that at least three naturalized U.S. citizens in Texas had their voter registrations revoked based on inaccurate Social Security data in SAVE, and that 25 percent of possible noncitizens identified by the system in Travis County, Texas had already proven their U.S. citizenship. Sooknanan emphasized that the Trump administration did not dispute these findings in court.

Voting rights advocates called the ruling a major victory. "As the Trump-Vance administration continues its attack on the right to vote, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which helped represent the challengers.

The Department of Homeland Security pushed back sharply. General Counsel James Percival said on social media that "it's amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist."

If appealed, federal officials face a shrinking window to restore SAVE before the midterms. Federal law prohibits sweeping voter purges less than 90 days before federal elections—in this case, early August. The administration had also planned to require states to run voter rolls through SAVE as a condition of receiving full homeland security grant funding, according to reporting hours before the ruling.

## Sources

- [Nebraska Examiner](https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/06/22/repub/trump-trampled-voter-privacy-by-feeding-info-into-homeland-security-system-judge-says/)
- [Campaign Legal Center explanation of the SAVE system](https://campaignlegal.org/update/what-save-system)
- [Nebraska Examiner article on Nebraska voter data transfer to DOJ](https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/02/12/nebraska-hands-over-sensitive-voter-data-to-doj-during-legal-fight/)

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This article was generated by AI (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) based on source material from Nebraska Examiner, enriched with 3 web searches. The original source is available at https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/06/22/repub/trump-trampled-voter-privacy-by-feeding-info-into-homeland-security-system-judge-says/.