In latest win for voters, appeals court rejects bid to revive DHS voter purge database, for now

A federal appeals court Friday rejected the Trump administration’s effort to immediately revive the use of a sweeping immigration database to check voter rolls, leaving in place a ruling that shut down a major piece of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting agenda ahead of the midterms.

In a 2-1 decision, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s emergency request to pause U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s ruling against the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. 

The ruling is another setback for the administration’s efforts to restrict voting ahead of November. And it comes a day after a federal judge blocked the administration from implementing Trump’s anti-mail voting order for the midterms.

The full legal fight over SAVE is not over, however. The D.C. Circuit, while keeping Sooknanan’s pause in place, ordered the underlying appeal expedited and directed the parties to submit a proposed accelerated briefing schedule within 10 days.

Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Robert Wilkins concluded that the government had not satisfied the “stringent requirements” for a stay, while Judge Gregory Katsas dissented.

Srinivasan and Wilkins both were nominated by President Barack Obama. Katsas was nominated by Trump.

Sooknanan’s ruling blocked DHS from using the expanded SAVE system as a mass voter-citizenship checker after finding that the administration lacked statutory authority for the overhaul, and that the scheme violated the Social Security Act, Privacy Act and Administrative Procedure Act.

Trump directed DHS last year to transform SAVE, a decades-old immigration-status verification program, into a tool state and local election officials could use to check the citizenship of people registering to vote or already on voter rolls. 

DHS linked SAVE to Social Security Administration records, enabled searches using Social Security numbers and added bulk-query functions that allowed officials to check large groups of voters at once.

Before Sooknanan blocked the program, the expanded SAVE system had been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters, mostly in Republican-led states. The system flagged thousands as potential noncitizens, though subsequent investigations found that many were actually eligible U.S. citizens. 

The D.C. Circuit highlighted that risk in rejecting the administration’s request.

The majority pointed to two naturalized U.S. citizens whose Social Security records still incorrectly identified them as noncitizens. If they were checked through modified SAVE, the court said, those outdated records could lead election officials to demand proof of citizenship or threaten their registrations. 

The court also noted DHS’s own warning that inaccuracies in Social Security data could produce “incomplete or false results.”

Evidence from Texas showed that the risk was not merely hypothetical, the court added. Voters there who were wrongly flagged through SAVE were required to prove their citizenship and, in some cases, had their registrations cancelled. 

The appeals court also faulted DOJ for basing much of its emergency request on legal arguments it failed to make before Sooknanan entered judgment.

The department raised its central new arguments about the Social Security Act only after losing the case. Sooknanan expressly invited DOJ to return to her with a post-judgment motion so those arguments could receive fuller consideration. 

Instead, the administration “came straight to our court,” the D.C. Circuit wrote.

DOJ argued that refusing to revive the system would prevent “millions of verifications” through SAVE. But the majority noted that the administration itself was asking for the “extraordinary relief” of a stay based largely on arguments it had forfeited in the district court. 

The court also rejected the suggestion that blocking modified SAVE leaves states unable to maintain accurate voter rolls. States performed those duties for decades before Trump’s 2025 expansion, the majority wrote, and Sooknanan’s ruling simply requires them to “return to those long-used methods while an appeal determines whether modified SAVE is lawful.”